


Alone, Together

by Cephied_Variable



Category: X-Men (Comicverse)
Genre: M/M, controversial pizza toppings, some depictions of extreme violence in passing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-15
Updated: 2019-05-15
Packaged: 2020-03-05 18:04:05
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 26,360
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18833896
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cephied_Variable/pseuds/Cephied_Variable
Summary: "I was pretty harsh last time we spoke. Didn’t think you’d wanna see me.”"It is your absurd stipulation that we cannot see each other when “broken up”.”Julio sighs through his nose. “That’s what being broken up is, Star.”Rictor and Shatterstar work their relationship out in ten tough conversations over about half as many years. Relationships, like detective work, often require communication.





	Alone, Together

**Author's Note:**

> I was literally 20,436 words into this when I realized there is a high probability that the X-Factor HQ 3.0 car didn’t survive Hell on Earth, or any of the bullshit before or after that, but I honestly couldn’t be assed to check. What is current continuity? We just don’t know. No one can legally prove that I have read a single comic released in the last ten years even if I make vague reference to them here or there. Please enjoy this fanfic that I wrote entirely by accident.

**(4).**

“Are you ashamed of me?” Star asked him once, on an empty stretch of desert highway - buttfuck nowhere Jalisco - at about two o’clock in the morning. Rictor was struggling to stay awake behind the wheel but he should’ve known a doozy was coming; Shatterstar had been brooding with his nose out the window for, like, three hours without saying a word. This was usually a prelude to either a philosophical observation about the most recent rerun of _Friends_ , or Star dropping a fucking nuke out of thin air.

“Star, I’ve told you a thousand times that’s not the problem. But I can’t have another round of the gay conversation this late at night.”

“That’s not what I meant.” Star swivels his head around, left eye reflecting light in the dark like a cat’s. “I meant - are you ashamed by my… _‘strange’_ behaviour?”

Ric laughs it off because, honestly - what else can he do when Shatterstar acts like this? tentatively seeking reassurance in their relationship like a sixth grader. Except he’s always so goddamn serious about it. “Are you kidding me? The fact that you’re so weird is one of the things I -” adore, “- _like_ most about you.” 

_‘I adore you’_ was the thing Shatterstar said the first time they went all the way. Earnest, honest, literal. Heartbreakingly so. Rictor saw him slice a Sentinel clear in half once - a single cut: clean and precise. He did the same thing, unintentionally, with words.

Star’s severe expression doesn’t flinch. “At our last rest stop, you used physical force to rush me out of the convenience store when I was merely requisitioning a refreshment. You were embarrassed.”

 _Oh_.

“You were filling a king sized sippy cup with frickin’ _jugo maggi_! _Madre de dios_ , Star! You’re not supposed to _drink_ maggi! People were staring!”

He blinks. “So you were ashamed?”

“No, I- !” Rictor runs a hand through his hair. Star’s kinda soft when he doesn’t have a sword in his hand - quiet, careful, _gentle_ \- but he still argues like he fights: every base covered before you even realize the first blow is coming. “Okay. Well, maybe a little,” he’s forced to admit. “But not for _me_. I like you the way you are, but I worry other people will -”

“Think I am odd? I am odd. I was genetically engineered to be unique. In a crowd, I will alwa -”

“Not _normal_ ,” Rictor interrupts. “In a bad way.”

Star chews on this for a few minutes, rubbing a lock of his long hair between thumb and forefinger. He was right about one thing - there was no way he was ever gonna blend into a crowd. “Is this like the ‘gay thing’?” he asks.

“Yeah,” Rictor tightens his hands on the steering wheel. “It’s exactly like that I guess.”

“Hm,” Star says, and thinks some more.

He thinks for a long enough time that it seems like the topic’s been dropped. They ride out of range of the radio station they were listening to and Ric starts fiddling with the dial, looking for anything but static.

Suddenly, Star laughs under his breath. It sounds canned - technically perfect, mechanical, as if rehearsed. He still has a hard time with that. “Ah, I understand now.”

Rictor doesn’t look up from the radio. Static, static, static. “What do you understand?”

“A common romantic trope in sitcoms.” Star makes a wide gesture with his hands, palms up. “Typically, a girl will defend her boyfriend’s bad attitude to her friends because she swears that he’s _“nice when they’re alone together”_. Until now this struck me as foolish. Why facilitate behaviour that is both duplicitous and cowardly? But I can see now that isn’t it.”

“Uh,” Ric slams the radio off with the butt of his hand. “What the hell is that supposed to mean?” he asks, staring up at Shatterstar through the fringe of his bangs. Star’s about as perfect looking as a guy bio-genetically engineered to be gorgeous can be at the best of times, but beneath a clear, desert night he’s practically luminous. No one on Earth has ever looked so good pouting out a metaphor about some plot point they saw on fucking _Saved by the Bell_.

“I am saying that I like the person you are when we’re together, Julio.” He turns his perfect profile away to stare out the window again. “Much better than the one you are around other people.”

Rictor sucks in a hiss through his teeth. _Christ_. Typical: incisive as a knife across the fuckin’ jugular. How the hell are you even supposed to respond to that? “... yeah,” is how Rictor responds, slow and tired. “Y’know what - me too, Star. Me too.”

And, well. Isn’t that the bitch of it all?

 

**(1).**

It was like a game, when he came back to X-Force, trying to guess who had figured out what was going on between him and Star, and who hadn’t.

A super fun, well-adjusted game, played by someone with a stringed-up tackboard in their garage and a list of magazine subscriptions that would put them on the ATF watchlist.

 _“Do you know what you’re doing?”_ Cable asked him.

 _“Pfft, yeah,”_ he said. And then he walked away before Cable could specify what he meant, because he didn’t want romantic or tactical advice from Mister Wannabe Mutant Pancho Villa.

 _“Ye’ really hurt him,”_ said Terry. _“Be careful. He’s very delicate beneath it all.”_

 _“Yeah, I know,”_ he replied. Because he did, and he was kinda put out and jealous that Terry did now too, which was fucked up, and unhealthy probably, and a whole tangle of other things he didn’t want to deal with right now.

So she knew.

 _“Yo, hombre, long time no see!”_ Roberto gave him two high fives - one high, one low. _“Sam and I vid-chat with the Muir Island gang the other week. Rahne’s looking good.”_

He did an eyebrow waggle there, which would’ve looked really stupid on anyone less handsome and slick.

So he _didn’t_ know. Which made sense, since he’d been back in his right mind all of two seconds before Rictor fucked off. Which meant that no one was _gossiping_.

Tabby walked right up to him and said: _“It’s cute to see Star trailing after you like a lost little puppy again, y’know?”_

Rictor swore he could feel his veins freeze. _“What the fuck does that mean?”_

 _“Uh, fucking nothing?”_ she blinked at him over her sunglasses. _“Geeze, calm down. I was just sayin’, Star was a huge drag without you around. Actually - and don’t let this go to your head, Ricardo Suave - but everything was a huge drag without you. You’re the only one on this team who knows how to lighten the hell up.”_

Feeling 100% like the asshole he was instead of the normal 98%, he shuffled his feet around. _“Oh. Uh. Well. Thanks.”_ Tabby was - sometimes, sorta, maybe on a good day - his best friend. In a “sister you can barely stand” kind of way. Still, she’d never been this nice to him.

 _“Anyway,”_ she jabbed him in the chest with a neon pink nail. _“I heard you got a new fake ID. You’ve been holding out on me, Ric! Hook a sister up!”_

Of course she had just been buttering him up. That’s how Tabby was. 

Anyway - she didn’t know.

Domino - two weeks after he got back - handed him a damned grocery list and told him to make a run for the mansion.

 _“What the fuck,”_ he said. _“We’re still X-Force, right? Since when do we run errands for Scott Summers?”_

_“Since I won’t tell Cable about your fake ID if you do what I ask, smart ass.”_

Ric groaned. Of course she knew about the fake ID. Domino was so freakishly perceptive you’d think she was the psychic, not Cable. _“Aw, shit. Fine.”_

She flicked him in the forehead. _“And take Star, would you? Cable hasn’t put him out on patrol or routine exercises since he got out of the med bay and he’s driving everyone batty.”_

 _“I was gonna.”_ Ric muttered. And he was- they had shit to talk about, him and Star. Shit that was best talked about far, far away from the X-Mansion, where the walls had literal ears.

Domino gave him a terrifying look - one so intense Ric was surprised lasers didn’t shoot out of her eyes and chop his balls off. All she said was: _“Good,”_ but she said it in a voice that could’ve choked out the Juggernaut.

Yeah, _of course_ she knew.

It was an understatement to say that Shatterstar was “driving everyone batty”. He was so stir-crazy you could’ve powered a whole city block off the energy he was giving off. Sometimes Star seemed vastly wise beyond his years, like an especially testy super-computer that happened to also be the reincarnation of Sun Tzu. Other times, he acted like a fucking two year old.

On the way into the city, he fiddled the stereo to something shitty and commercial every time Rictor tried to change it.

 _“I like pop music now,”_ he said snottily. _“Tabitha often listened to it with me while we trained.”_

 _When you were gone_ , was the unspoken implication.

Ric lost him in the Kroger three times. The first time, he found him perched on top of the cereal aisle shaking boxes that claimed to have decoder rings in them. The second time, he caught him zero-point-two fucking seconds before he pried the shell off an innocent, unassuming lobster with the edge of his two-bladed sword. The third time, Star was waiting for him on the other side of the check-out with an expression like Rictor had been the one holding them up.

This is how they end up sniping at each other about pineapple outside a pizza shop, so loud that pedestrians are giving them a wide berth.

“- and I’m sayin’ the problem isn’t just that pineapple on pizza tastes like, ass, Star, but they always put these unnecessarily huge fuckin’ chunks on it and it just makes the whole thing soggy and gross!” Rictor is actually waving his arms. He thought he was going to come out here and have an awkward relationship conversation with his extra-dimensional pseudo-boyfriend, but instead he’s being forced to defend one of the most basic facts of life: Hawaiian pizza fucking sucks.

Shatterstar - looking ridiculous trying to be imperious in his acid-wash booty shorts and pastel-purple windbreaker - crosses his arms with grim finality. “The large chunks are necessary, as the pineapple juice must be allowed to soak into the meat and sauce during the cooking process.”

“ _Madre mia_ , I can’t fucking believe - look, why don’t we just order a split pizza. I’ll get whatever I want on my side, and you can fill yours with nothing but pineapple. Problem solved!”

“Absolutely not,” Star says.

“Why the _hell_ not?”

“It is an unfair burden to place on the pizza maker, who I presume is not working at a wage that fairly compensates their time and labour.”

Ric rolls his eyes. “Okay, it is basically zero effort for them to throw different toppings on either side. They do it all the fucking time.”

“Logistically, it would take twice as long to prepare a pizza in this manner. You never think about how your actions inconvenience others. Stop being so difficult.”

“Oh, right. _I’m_ the one being difficult right now!”

“Julio,” Shatterstar says. He says it in a completely neutral tone, but he hasn’t actually used Rictor’s first name like that since they were reunited, not after that first time in the med-lab. Ric deflates at the sound of it.

They order a pizza with pineapple on both sides.

Nothing Prof. X’s shopping list called for is perishable, so Rictor drives them out somewhere past the city center to eat their shitty pizza in peace. There’s an abandoned industrial park a fifteen minute jaunt outside Westchester where he, Tabs and 'Berto would sometimes go to drink beer back when the New Mutants were holed up living in the Danger Room. They brought Rahne once, because Ric was sweet on her, but that ended badly after she refused to - as she put it - “partake in the Devil’s Drink”, and so Tabby forced her to shotgun half a Colt 45 and then she started crying and wanted to go home and then Sam found out that they were underage drinking and told Cable, who took away Tabby’s fake ID.

 _Rahne’s looking good_ , Roberto said, and Ric bet she was. She’d really come out of her shell after Genosha, which was something he had no idea how to feel about. Like - good? But also? Fucked up? Rictor told her once that he liked her because she was honest. Then they went through hell together and she hasn’t said a true word to him since. Now he was here with someone who was so honest that it was fucking _annoying_.

They park the van aside an old warehouse and climb up to the roof. Well, Rictor climbs up. Star takes the pizza in one hand and vaults straight from the nose of the van to the top of the warehouse in a silent, elegant arc. Rictor wants badly to hate him for something like five whole seconds, because he’s undeniably been a pill all night, but he can’t quite bring himself to do it. Not when he sees Star’s face knit in sincere concentration as he uses a sword to refine the gummy lines left in the pizza by the cook. His bangs have grown out to his shoulders since he came to earth, framing his face in a way that refines his features rather than hiding them. You can actually see his eyes. Sometimes, he smiles.

Star lifts a slice of pizza with his blade and offers it to Rictor. They eat in silence for ten minutes, staring out at the sea of lights glittering through the hazy fog drifting off the Hudson.

“I hate to admit this,” Rictor grumbles. “But you were right about the juice needing to cook into meat.” He still wasn’t gonna be caught dead actually eating the pineapple, but it definitely added something to the rest of the dish.

Shatterstar hums. He’s been smug as fuck since winning the argument. It’s infuriating, but also kind of charming, the way he treats even trivial victories as another checkmark on his unimpeachable record. “Maybe I know some things after all. Things that you don’t.”

Rictor picks a piece of pineapple from his slice and tosses it off the roof. “We aren’t fighting about the pizza, are we?”

Shatterstar chews thoughtfully. After a few minutes, he says. “I am glad that you are back, Julio, but I am still cross with you.”

“For leaving? C’mon, dude, I’ve apologized a hundred times.”

“You’ve apologized exactly twelve times, which is excessive considering that is not what I’m upset about.”

Rictor blinks. “What did I do _now_?” He’s barely had the time to piss anyone off since he came back, let alone the one person in the universe who, for some reason, _enjoyed_ putting up with his bullshit.

“You lied.”

 _Right_. “Ah. Yeah. I… I do that sometimes. You’ll hafta be more specific.”

Star nods, and says without preamble: “Before you left, when we “practiced” kissing -”

Rictor coughs up a chunk of pizza dough. “ _Star_ -”

“- you said that it was normal to get carried away. It didn’t mean that we ‘liked’ each other.”

Rictor presses his mouth into a flat line. It doesn’t know if it wants to smile grimly, or frown, or freak out with the rest of him and jump off the roof. He can’t even remember what the hell he was trying to prove with that _whole_ venture. _“Oh,”_ Star had said after the first kiss, like he was figuring out the secret at the center of the universe. Then he shoved Rictor up against the wall and messily put his tongue in his mouth. “I did say that, didn’t I.”

“I understand if you need to lie about your own feelings, Julio, but do not mislead me about mine.”

“Yeah. I…” he sighs and runs a hand through his hair. “I wasn’t thinking.”

“I know you weren’t. You often don’t. That is why I’m telling you.”

Rictor whips around and points at him. “Look, I did you dirty so I’ll give you one more diss that good before I vibrate you straight off this warehouse, got that amigo?”

Star tucks his chin and smiles. “Whatever, Rictor.”

Rictor chucks a piece of pineapple at him. Shatterstar, of course, catches it out of the air with flawless, feline grace, and pops it in his mouth.

The next silence that falls is more companionable. Back to normal. Star was the only person in the world Rictor could just be _quiet_ around without getting all neurotic and feeling like the silence was a big, fat ball of animosity rolling around the room, gathering steam like a snowball into an avalanche. They polish off the pizza with minimal fuss aside from Rictor making a little pineapple mass grave on the pavement below them.

“If you leave again, take me with you,” Shatterstar says finally.

“Okay,” Rictor replies, surprised at how easily he means it.

“I don’t require anything more from you,” Star adds, rubbing a lock of his hair between thumb and forefinger. “I may not understand human reservations about sexuality, but I respect that you struggle with them. I still have a lot about myself to figure out as well. Being your ‘best friend’ is more than acceptable.”

Rictor picks at one of the studs on his leather bracelet. “I think it’d be delusional to pretend that we aren’t more than friends at this point.”

“We can be both ‘friends’ and ‘more than friends’. I do not see why these categories are generally considered separate. We can, as they often say on sitcoms when relationships have similarly disastrous false starts, “take it slow”.”

Rictor cautions a look at Shatterstar from the corner of his vision. He’s still playing with his bracelet. Star’s playing with his grown-out bangs, staring at the damp pavement. It’s a balmy evening, which always makes Ric’s hair feel about as heavy and flat as cooled lead, but frizzes Star’s right up.

Rictor decides to do something bold. He closes the space between them and slides his hands up the length of Shatterstar’s neck. Star’s lips taste like pineapple and tomato sauce when they kiss. Once, twice - a third time, open mouthed.

Star’s eyes are about the size and brightness of a full moon when they part. Looking like he’s just figured out the secret at the center of the universe.

“We don’t have to take it _that_ slow,” Rictor says with a grin.

 

**(7).**

“I’m surprised you agreed just like that.” Julio’s voice is thick and raspy the way it often gets when he has been thinking about something too hard and for too long without getting any outside perspective.

“Why wouldn’t I?” They are here in central New York about to embark on a favour for Samuel Guthrie, who neither of them would ever say no to.

Julio kicks at the dirt. Shoves his hands in his pockets. “ ‘Cause I was pretty harsh last time we spoke. Didn’t think you’d wanna see me.”

Shatterstar glances up from his map. Julio is newly clean-shaven. His hair grown out just above his shoulders. The combination is extremely complementary to his sharp jawline. After all this time, Shatterstar still cannot understand why he hates being looked at. “It is your absurd stipulation that we cannot see each other when “broken up”.”

Julio sighs through his nose. “That’s what being broken up is, Star.”

With a shrug, Shatterstar goes back to his map. They must plan out their teleportation route carefully in advance to avoid making unnecessary jumps. “You have said many harsh things to me in our time together, Julio. I always want to see you.”

“Yeah, I _know_.” Under his breath, Julio says: “You’ve practically been stalking me. Don’t think I haven’t noticed.”

Shatterstar does not deny the accusation. Julio would not have seen him if he were attempting to hide, and he would have not been able to do it more than once if Julio were truly that offended.

Julio has more to say: “But _seeing_ and talking are whole different ball-games, amigo.”

“It sounds like you are the one uncomfortable talking to me,” Shatterstar observes. “In which case - why did you agree “just like that”?”

“ _Ugh_ ,” Julio says, and goes to sit in the car. 

They’re borrowing the old X-Factor hearse from Layla, who says that she owes Shatterstar exactly five favours: for what happened in Latveria, for helping out at the farm after what happened to Jamie, and for several things that haven’t happened yet. He dislikes this notion of expected reciprocal exchange within a friendship - he would have done those things without promise of a reward - but Layla being Layla has never once asked his permission before “paying him back”.

He finishes drawing lines on the map and then he also enters the car. Julio is sitting in the driver’s seat, with his forehead mashed up against the wheel. Shatterstar stares at him for a few long minutes until it becomes clear that he is not going to take initiative to start the engine without some gentle prodding.

“Julio,” he prods gently. “You are the one with control over the vehicle.”

“Ugh,” Julio says again. “Look I’m sorry.”

“The problem is easily solved. I can operate the car if -”

“No, that’s - that’s not what I meant.” He pushes off the wheel. His eyes are red, and a little bit puffy. “It’s just, this whole thing is bringing back a lot of bad memories that I haven’t exactly processed yet. In fact, I’ve spent most of the past ten years repressing them so, like -”

Shatterstar nods. He had been expecting this when Sam said the words _“Genosha”_ and _“Genegineer”_. For many mutants, these words trigger unpleasant memories. For Julio, they have secondary associations that extend far beyond the borders of Genosha itself.

“- and I’m just takin’ that shit out on you because it’s easy. We should be able to get along even when we’re broken up. We should be able to be friends.”

“Like I said: your absurd stipulation.”

Julio’s expression goes flat, but Shatterstar can tell that he’s fighting a smile. A sad smile, but a smile nonetheless. He moves his hand like he’s going to set it on Shatterstar’s shoulder, or maybe even his hand; he seems to think better of it and ends up rolling it uselessly in the air before settling it on the armrest. Neutral territory. “I’m glad you’re the one Sam sent. If I’d cried in front of Illyana, or like, fucking Pixie? Is that her name? _Dios_ , I’d have to kill myself.”

“I do not think Sam would have entrusted a mission like this to someone as young as Miss Gwynn.”

The hint of Julio’s smile disappears. Sam has asked them to follow-up on an evidence trail which suggests that several ex-Genoshan scientists are attempting to sell a new version of the mutate formula on the black market, using connections in the Latin American cartel networks.

 _I’m surprised you agreed just like that,_ Julio said, but they look they exchanged in Sam’s office had carried more weight and meaning than almost anything that had passed between them since their reunion in New England. This was a mission suited uniquely to them. And they had unfinished business concerning Mexico.

“Yeah. That’s for fuckin’ sure,” Julio says grimly, and starts up the engine. 

Shatterstar watches the scenery clip by, chin in his palm. He has done a good job of deprogramming himself from the unconscious idea that life should play out with the tidy sequentiality of fiction, but somehow this trip feels fortuitous. They’re driving north right now to get out of the city before they teleport, but this is still familiar: Julio in the driver’s seat, him with the window down, Mexico on the horizon.

Julio burns like a flame at the corner of his vision, an echo of his younger self glimmering like a ghost against his eyelids when he blinks. They have never talked about what happened in Mexico. It hangs between them sometimes, mostly during arguments, but if Julio cannot broach the subject, how can Shatterstar find the words to talk about it? Although he possesses near perfect recall, he has a difficult time connecting with the version of himself who drove south with Julio all those years ago. Because that was Julio’s story; of _course_ he was the protagonist. He was vibrant, flawed and tragic. A true heroic underdog, all the more sympathetic for his spiky exterior and his cruel sense of humour. The greatest Programmers of Longshot’s age could not hope to script a witty rejoinder as sharp as what came to Julio naturally in those days. Shatterstar had viewed himself as the “sidekick” back then. It seemed natural at the time, because the weight of the life he’d lived as a headlining act was unbearable in light of the life he was now living on Earth, and because Julio was so bright and large in his eyes at the time that he could see nothing else.

Julio takes a turn off the highway and drives into the wilderness until they can’t see any city lights. Shatterstar hangs out the window and pops his swords. “Are you picturing it?”

“Yeah, yeah -” Julio grouses impatiently, but his mood flips a hundred and eighty degrees when they emerge on the other side of the teleportation portal in rural Oaxaca.

He stumbles out of the car and just stares out at the landscape. Shatterstar can hear him taking in deep, full-chested breaths. The air here smells the same as it does in the southern United States, but Shatterstar knows that Julio has a deep and reverent love of his homeland, compounded by his unfortunate state of exile from it.

“Shit,” he says when Shatterstar comes to join him. They’ve come to a stop beneath the shade of a giant cypress tree, knee deep in evening fog. They can see green mountains in the distance.

Shatterstar leans against the chassis of the vehicle and hums in agreement. Julio leans back too, pressing their arms together, but avoiding eye contact. Aside from the emotional baggage, they are also both wanted men in this country.

“Y’know, I think a lot about -” Julio hesitates, runs a hand through his hair. “I think that it wasn’t fair for me to take you here.”

“It’s where I wanted to go.” _With you_.

“Yeah but… it wasn’t your responsibility. It wasn’t mine either, but I was angry and dumb and I had this, like, romantic vision of burning down my past with my own hands, ‘cause I was a melodramatic fucking teenager. I shouldn’t have made you…” he trails off.

Shatterstar tips his head to one side. The sun is going down, and Julio is hiding behind his hair. “You’ve helped me do the same,” he points out softly. “All things being equal.”

Julio winces. They haven’t talked about Mojoworld either. He makes an unhappy noise in the back of his throat and pushes off the car. “Things haven’t ever been equal between us, Star.”

Strange. Shatterstar has had many years to map intention onto Julio’s often roundabout and inarticulate manner of expressing himself, but he has no idea what he could possibly mean by that.

“C’mon, dude -” Julio says breezily, “- we’ve got a warehouse to shake down.” When he grins, it shows too many teeth. “Just like _old times_.”

 

**(5).**

“You doin’ okay there, big guy?” Domino pokes his shoulder.

Shatterstar pulls the hotel comforter up to his nose and digs himself deeper into the couch. He’s still got six hours left in HBO’s James Bond marathon and he does not intend to move until he has seen the end credits of _Goldeneye_.

“Okay. I don’t wanna get all ‘mom’ about this, but this ain’t the Ritz, kid. This is a designated safe house paid for by my current employer. We can’t stay here forever, no matter _how_ sad you are about getting dumped.” Domino sets her chin on the back of the couch and huffs. “I have no idea how you even found me, by the way.”

“I was trained by the best, wasn’t I?” Shatterstar mumbles into the blanket. The truth was embarrassingly simple: he knew where Theresa was, and Theresa knew where Deadpool was, and Deadpool knew where _everyone_ in the mercenary world was. And, also, Deadpool was always up for a good duel. Not that fighting him had brought any comfort or closure - the infernal pest had mocked him from beginning to end.

_“Aw, geeze, lookat those huge, sad, puppy-dog eyes. What happened to you, Big Red? You’re such a wreck I can’t even take satisfaction in wiping the floor with you like usual. Would it help if I let you win?”_

Under any other circumstances, Shatterstar would have been humiliated, but Julio robbed him of that as well. He’d simply sheathed his swords and walked away. Pride, victory, strength - it didn’t matter.

Nothing mattered.

For some reason, he wanted to say that out loud again very badly, but the last time he’d voiced that particular sentiment Domino laughed and called him a dramatic teen cliche.

She’s sighing now. “Star. This is just how these things go, okay? Everyone’s first relationship seems like the biggest deal in the world, but they almost never work out. I know twenty is like ancient on Mojoworld, but you’re not even legal drinking age in America yet. There’s plenty of fish in the sea.”

“I do not _want_ a fish!” Shatterstar sits up and throws the blanket to the floor. “Why do people keep saying that to me!?” Theresa had used the same phrase. How could they not understand that this separation had direly wounded his _uemeur_? He was hurt in a deep and profound way that could not be repaired by his healing factor. His chest hurts. His face hurts. His nose is leaking mucus. He sniffs, and it all goes down his throat, so he starts coughing.

“Ohmigod, are you _crying_?”

“No,” Shatterstar answers, because the Spineless Ones did not program crying into the genetic code of arena warriors. Domino rounds the couch and perches on the arm. She takes his face in her cool hands, wiping the moisture away from his eyes.

“You’ve got liquid coming out of your eyes, Star. That’s what crying is.”

“Oh.” He blinks, and more liquid comes out. “Then yes, I am crying.”

Domino runs a hand across her face and groans. “Christ, I hate this shit. You know, you were always my favourite _because_ I hate this shit.”

“I’m sorry,” Shatterstar says sincerely. He is mortified to have inconvenienced Domino while she is working.

“No, I -” she shakes her head. “Crap, I didn’t mean it like that. Look, I know how it is. I’ve cried plenty of tears over guys who weren’t worth it.”

“Julio is worth it,” he says fiercely.

Domino doesn’t quite roll her eyes, but they definitely go to the ceiling as she hops off the couch. “Uh huh. If you’re still saying that in two weeks when the wound’s not so fresh, maybe _then_ I’ll believe he’s something special. Until then, Ric’s on my shit list. You’re too good for him, Star.”

“How can you say that!?” Shatterstar’s eyes go wide. “Rictor was your comrade-in-arms for almost as long as I was.”

“Sure. But I warned him not to hurt you, and he did anyway.” There is something vaguely ominous about this statement, as she says it while lifting one of her favourite guns out of its case and examining the energy cells beneath the slide mechanism. “Even if I knew it was gonna shake out like this, my first loyalty is still to you. You get me in the divorce, just like I got you when Cable and I went splitsville.”

Shatterstar furrows his brow. His tears stop as he is forced to process new information. “You and Cable were married?”

Domino throws her head back and laughs, halfway zipped into her battle armour. “Jesus _Christ_! God _no_! Can you imagine!?”

“But I am still expected to stake loyalty in one of you over the other? Will I have to endure an ugly custody battle in which the prosecution and defense throw absurd stories at each other while jockeying about your annual salaries as if monetary worth is analogous to moral fibre?”

Domino stops zipping up her leathers and casts him a befuddled look over her shoulder. “Are you just describing the plot of _Kramer vs. Kramer_ now?”

Shatterstar looks at his hands. “I have no frame of reference for this situation.” He makes fists in the fabric of his pants, suddenly furious. “For any of this. _Fekt!_ I never _wanted_ any frame of reference for this. It’s irrelevant. The body is meat. I was never meant to form emotionally intimate attachments. I’ve been experiencing a long-term programming defect.”

“Whoa, whoa -” Domino whistles low. She crosses the room and grabs his face again - not gently this time. “It’s been a long time since I’ve heard you talk like that. Don’t start that shit again.”

His eyes slide off her, towards the TV where James Bond is calmly choking a woman to unconsciousness. Shatterstar had always found him to be a curious cultural icon: a human, who operated without emotion or remorse. He would have done well in the arena. Why did the human world demand he change on such a fundamental level when they worshipped the sort of creature he was under Mojo’s control?

Domino’s grip on his cheeks tightens. She forces him to look at her. She’s stopped joking around now and is examining him with an expression that he recognizes as both rare and sincere. She looks genuinely worried for him. “What the hell even happened between you two?”

Shatterstar shuts his eyes.

_\-- “ - the fuck did you do?” Julio is saying as Shatterstar slides his sword from the body._

_He had been about to pull the trigger so -_

_“I told you - I fuckin’ told you - we don’t kill anyone unless I -”_

_Unless Julio says so. But there had only been a single freeze-frame to think, and -_

_“Shit. Shit. He’s got an ATF badge on him, I knew it. I fucking knew it -”_

_It seemed an unlikely plot twist that a US government agent would be consorting so enthusiastically with Julio’s family business. So -_

_“I said this shit was complicated, Star. More complicated than anything you had to deal with on Mojoworld. Madre mia… this is why you -”_

_Defer to Julio on everything, yes. But not when his life was in danger._

_“It’s not like the stuff we did with X-Force either, okay. There’s no good guys or bad guys.”_

_Of course not. ‘Good guys’ and ‘bad guys’ are a fictional construct inappropriate for the genre we currently find ourselves in. Julio’s babbling, of course. Not listening at all. The body doesn’t get disposed of because there were other people around, nipping on their heels. Someone had a camera and -_

_“Oh, fuck me -” Julio is crunching up the newspaper so hard it’s coming apart under his palm. His picture is in it. They have to ditch the truck. Their gear. It’s six days on the run, living rough, until they can secure a room in the seediest flophouse in Oaxaca. Julio’s name is still in the news. He’s -_

_“Yeah, Star, I am_ freaking the fuck out, _thanks for noticing!”_

_It will -_

_“Don’t even try to tell me that it will be okay! Nothing is remotely in the same fucking zipcode as okay! We pissed in the wrong guy’s cheerios. Shit, I didn’t think the old man had it in him to get mixed up in gunwalking. This is too big for us, man. This is like -” Julio pulls his hair so hard its splintering in places. “- I can never come back.”_

_What?_

_“When this is all over - I’m fuckin’ done here. I can never come back to Mexico. Not unless I want a bullet in the fucking back. The government wants my ass, and they just showed it on national TV to every damn Cartel that my ‘Pa and my Uncle Gonzo even so much as blinked at.”_

_Don’t be ridiculous. I would -_

_“Protect me? How? You still don’t get it, how deep this shit runs. It’s like blood, man. It’s too deeply embedded, unless the whole damn system changes. And it’s not just us. It’s Colombia, and Guatemala, and America too. Especially America. Can you fix that, Star? Can you go back and time and assassinate like, six fucking US Presidents and a couple Mexican ones too?”_

_Theoretically, considering the kind of life we have lived, this is not impossi -_

_“Don’t even try to joke with me right now.”_

_I’m no -_

_“I know you aren’t. Christ, that makes it even worse. I - I can’t be around you right now. I’m fucking serious, I can’t stand to look at your stupid face. Can you just - be somewhere else for a while?”_

_For how long a while?_

_“I don’t know, Star! A good, long, fucking while! Use your best judgment, amigo - oh wait, that’s what got us into this fucking mess!”_

\-- “It doesn’t matter,” he whispers. “Domino. I promise, it does not.”

This answer does not seem to be satisfactory, but Domino is as unequipped to handle this sort of thing as he is. That is probably why he wanted to see her so badly.

“If you say so.” She lets go of him and goes to start strapping weapons to her outfit. “Anyway… you wanna come along on my mission or what?”

“Will I get to use my swords?”

“Yeah.” She turns around and beams at him, brandishing a very large knife. “According to my intel, it’s gonna be robots all the way down, and anyone who isn’t a robot will definitely have it coming, so the stabbing will be guilt free and everything.”

Shatterstar realizes suddenly that he is smiling back at her. He almost doesn’t recognize the way his face is contorting, because it has been a long time since he’s made this expression. He’s not... _happy_. Not at all. But he does relish the idea of putting a blade into something without having to answer for it. Or think about it afterward. 

Finally. A problem with absolutely no troubling moral dimension to it.

*

_He thought that Julio would be gone when he returned. Had braced himself for it. Made sure that the montage he walked around the small town gave a wide enough berth that they wouldn’t run into each other when Julio ran out on him, because if he did, he would -_

_\- he doesn’t know what he would do. Dishonour himself, no doubt, in various ways. Hasn’t he already dishonoured himself beyond repair? Julio would be dead now if he had not thrown his blade, and so he was right to have done it. Pathetic, that he didn’t try harder to defend himself. He should have fought. Argued back. But Julio is the protagonist, of course he is. Shatterstar is --_

_\- on his own, he is:_

_Walking through a haze of syndication when he turns the knob of the motel room. His mind is running the death of the ATF agent on repeat reel. All he can hear is the one-sided argument he and Julio have been having for a hundred and forty four hours straight in vicious stereo. He thinks it’s an illusion at first, it has to be, when he pushes the door open and sees Julio seated at the kitchenette - dressed down to sweat-stained undershirt and the same dirty jeans he’s been wearing for a week straight, hair undone and tucked behind one ear. He’s got his chin in his palm and he looks both like he’s been crying, and rubbing his eyes raw to stop himself from crying._

_In a proper dream sequence, he would be clean and glowing and wearing that shy, little half-smile he did when he thought no one was looking. But Shatterstar would never imagine Julio as perfect._

_“Hey,” Julio says, tossing his head back. “Star, close the fucking door.”_

_Shatterstar closes the door. He doesn’t do anything after that, so Julio gestures towards the spare chair. “Dude, sit down. You’re creeping me out.”_

_Shatterstar feels everything go wide-screen as he tries to guess the scene’s motivation. Is he still upset about the ATF Agent?_

_“Nah, it’s not that.”_

_Shatterstar sits down and traces the grain of the table. The wood is unfinished - an unnecessary setting detail that nevertheless adds authenticity to the encounter. A splinter knicks the pad of his finger and he starts bleeding._

_He raises his head and looks at Julio,_ who really is here.

“It would be reasonable if you were,” he says, and his voice is hoarse from disuse. “It was a grave tactical error. I should not have acted so hastily.”

“Star, I’m serious. I’m not pissed at you anymore. At _all_.” He laughs a little bit, tinny and breathless. “Isn’t that weird?”

Shatterstar doesn’t answer. He doesn’t know which part of it is “weird”.

Julio, helpfully, elaborates, tugging at a loose thread on his shirt until the hem starts to unravel. “When I kicked you out last night, I just felt worse. And then I realized - I haven’t had a real conversation with anyone but you for… for fuckin’ months! All this time, it’s just been you and me and I hardly noticed. And I was so mad I could’ve literally exploded, man. I - I could’ve hit you, I was so pissed off! And yeah, yeah - before you say it, I know that me punching you would be like breaking glass off a brick wall, but shut up for a minute and let me finish, okay?”

“I wasn’t going to say anything,” Shatterstar says honestly. Julio could probably punch him hard enough to do non-negligible damage if he used his powers. He hasn’t put any thought into their tactical odds against each other, as he prefers to fight side by side.

“Sorry,” Julio sighs. “That just sounded exactly like the lull in my rant where you’d usually be a snotty Miss Smarty Pants about something totally irrelevant.”

Shatterstar blinks. “Do you want me to be a Miss Smarty Pants right now?”

Julio shakes his head. “No. What I wanted - like, the fucking moment you left the building last night, was for you to come back and comfort me. I wanted _you_ to comfort _me_ because of a thing _you_ did that made me mad! And when I say it out loud like that… I mean… that’s weird, right?”

Shatterstar chooses to deliberate about this for several minutes. Julio waits it out patiently. This is something he has always valued in Julio, that he’s always so testy and anxious and “chatterbox”ey, except when he can tell Shatterstar needs time to sort out his thoughts. It is a level of consideration he never thought himself worth having, because he did not even know it existed.

Raising his arms diplomatically, he says: “My perspective on this is limited. I do not have the breadth of experience with relationships that you do. I make sense of the world through our friendship. What you are describing sounds normal to me.”

“ _Dios_.” Rictor sets his cheek in his palm again, gaze drifting somewhere above Shatterstar’s head. “You realize that I don’t have any relationship experience either, right? I mean - Rahne thought we’d both go to hell if she let me touch her boob so we never actually got past the ‘making googly eyes at each other’ stage of dating. And I didn’t even really, like, have friends when I was a kid. Just my cousins, who I mostly think felt sorry for me -”

“Yes, I know.” Julio has told him this many times. “We were both very lonely.”

“So when you put it like that, it’s kind of like the blind leading the blind, y’know.”

Shatterstar tips his head to the side and peers at Julio curiously. “I am not “putting it like that”, Julio. You are.”

Julio peers back at him for a very long time. “You have no idea what I’m gettin’ at here, do you?”

“I’m sorry, no.”

Julio rocks back in his chair and bites his lip, staring hard at the ceiling. “I’m just starting to feel like…”

He doesn’t finish the sentence. There are still many things about normal conversational courtesy that Shatterstar does not understand, such as how long a pause in conversation one must observe before asking for further clarification. 

He gives Julio as long as Julio gave him before asking: “Like what?”

The chair slams down on the floor so hard that everything in the room shakes. A bit of that might be Julio’s powers. He lets out a frustrated noise through his nose and says: “Nevermind. Come over here and comfort me already, would you?”

Julio says this like it’s a joke, but there’s a crack running through his voice. His defenses are built high, but they’re as transparent and fragile as glass. Nothing about him is subtle. Shatterstar strides to the other side of the table and takes Julio’s face in both hands, tips it up so that his skin is glowing in the orange morning light. He rubs a thumb under one of Julio’s eyes, across the dark bruise of sleeplessness there; the skin is soft, like scar tissue, and Julio leans into the touch. Shatterstar kisses him: chaste, but loving. There is an enormous emotion humming in his hands that he can never express with words, whatever it is between them that takes his body made for violence and makes it want to be infinitely gentle. Julio’s hands grope at his chest, turn to fists in the fabric of his shirt, and he deepens the kiss. They’re both filthy and rancid from six days of living in ditches, but still - alive, and together. Shatterstar tilts Julio’s jaw until his mouth opens under his, and they kiss like that for a while, until Julio breaks away, panting.

“I still haven’t slept,” he croaks, eyes on the table. “Can you go get me a coffee, dude?”

Shatterstar gives his face an affectionate squeeze before he lets go. “Of course. I shall procure us a warm meal as well.” He had taken note of a small _comedóres_ two streets over which had a chicken coup out front and seemed to serve breakfast dishes specifically. All they’d eaten while on the run were protein bars, cactus pulp and - once - an armadillo cooked over open fire.

Julio smiles - small and shy - as he draws patterns on the table surface with his fingernail. “Thanks, Star. You’re the best.”

*

Of course: Julio was gone when he came back with breakfast.

Shatterstar _stands in the doorway, stunned, playing out their last conversation on rewind - forwards, backwards, pausing it at every juncture to examine clues in Julio’s body language, his tone of voice, the warning bells that should have set him off. He recognizes all of them in retrospect, because he has now experienced them, but how was he supposed to see it at the time -_

The note said - in large print and with consideration to Shatterstar’s mostly phonetic understanding of the English language - several absurd things such as: _Star, I’m sorry,_ and: _but we need time apart to get our heads together_. He signed it “Rictor”. As if Shatterstar were any other teammate and not the person to whom he’d given the special permission to use a name that he otherwise closely guarded.

Shatterstar tosses the coffee and the take-out boxes behind him so that he can unsheathe one of his swords and cleave the table clean in half. And then he does it again, splintering it into uneven quarters. He blacks out for a few minutes, he must, because when he blinks his eyes open again, he has both swords out and he’s trashed the entire room, down to putting a dent in the wall with the television. He drops his swords and tries to catch his breath. His reaction to this has been shameful and immature, he realizes, and it did not even make him feel better. On television, characters often feel better after they “throw a fit” or “let off steam”. The true complication of real life is that all actions lead to different conclusions. You cannot do the same thing twice and expect the same result. There is no script.

He picks up the note and reads it again. The last line sticks with him for years afterward because he thinks, perhaps, that Julio has a point.

_Go figure yourself out._

 

**(8).**

“You know, I had a panic attack the first time me and Star kissed.”

“That doesn’t surprise me at all.”

“Shut up, Tabs. I’m bearing my soul here. But that’s fucked up, right?”

“It’s kinda an over-reaction, yeah, but this is you we’re talking about. The first time you kissed Rahne you were all like _‘oh, I’m gonna single-handedly bring down a brutal Apartheid State with my bare fucking hands, and then we’re going to run off into the sunset together and have a whole litter of cute, redheaded puppies’_. I can’t believe you didn’t swear a blood oath against Mojo the first time Shatterstar fluttered his pretty, extremely repressed - oh, and did I mention, _redheaded_ \- eyelashes at you.”

Rictor drags his face out of the pillow and gives her a dirty look. Tabitha’s arranged herself like she’s his shrink, perched on one of his kitchen chairs with a notebook propped on her knee and a cheap beer dangling from her fingertips. She had to get him halfway through the 12-pack before he admitted he was going to see Shatterstar soon.

“ _I_ wasn’t the one who was over-reacting,” he insists. “Who the hell goes from _‘I didn’t realize I could get a boner’_ to _‘I can’t live without you’_ in the span of two weeks? With a guy they’ve known for, like, six months?”

Tabby tips her sunglasses. “I think you missed my larger criticism about your dating record there, Shaky.”

“We’re not talking about, _me,_ Tabby. We’re talking about _him_.”

She sighs and starts scribbling in the notebook. “Okay, what kind of person jumps headfirst into a lifelong commitment at the age of seventeen with someone the’ve basically just met. How about: an alien gladiator with highly arrested development experiencing positive emotions for the first time?”

Rictor waves a hand. “Right. I mean - he didn't know what the fuck love even was back then. I still don’t think he gets it.”

She taps the notebook with her pen. “I’ll put it on the list: ‘ex-boyfriend might be too alien to understand what love is’. Is that one for or against?”

Rictor groans and buries his face in the couch again.

“Geeze freaking Lousie, Ric, why are we making this list if you _sooooo_ obviously don’t wanna get back together?”

“Because we have to do this mission together,” Ric says into the pillow. “And if we’re alone together, we’re gonna fuck. And if we fuck, Star’s gonna want to have a _talk_ about our _relationship_ , and his arguments are always more thorough than mine.”

Tabby snorts. “Then don’t fuck. Easy as that.”

Rictor raises his head and scowls. A little helplessly. She whistles and starts scribbling away on the legal pad again. “Lost your virginities to each other, and the sex is still _that_ good? That’s _definitely_ going on the list.”

“It’s not like that,” Ric mutters. He sits up and stares at his hands.

“Really? I mean, I _know,_ personally, that Shatty is extremely proficient at _everything_ he puts his mind to.”

Finally: there it is. “Yeah, maybe don’t fuckin’ remind me about those four months he spent sleeping around while we were still in a relationship?” he snarls. “Actually, wait - do remind me of that. Put it on the list.” 

Tabitha hesitates. “Y’know. From what you've said, you were the one who didn’t actually lay down boundaries when -”

“Oh!” Rictor throws the pillow over his shoulder as hard as he can. The whole apartment shudders when it hits the wall, because he threw it _that_ hard and it’s the heaviest pillow on the face of the planet. Not because of his poor anger management skills, nope! “So it’s my fault now!” 

Tabby points at him with her beer bottle, sloshing a bit of it onto his carpet. “Hey, hey, dickweed, I didn’t say that. But -” she eases back in her seat. “A little. Yeah.” 

Rictor scoffs. “ _Dios,_ it’s always like this! I’m always the bad guy because _poor, naive Star_ doesn’t understand the big scary human world!” 

Tabby pops her gum. “Well, it’s true, isn’t it? You’re the one who made me stop telling him when celebrities were ‘cancelled’ because he takes it the wrong way! And you always used to flip out at Maria back in the day when she -” 

“Okay, yeah, fine!” Rictor shoots up off the couch as he shouts. “I didn’t set boundaries! I’m still pissed off about it!” 

“Cool stuff. Then… don’t fuck him.”

Ric clenches his hands into fists. 

Tabitha snorts. “ _Oh, Tabs, it’s not liiiiike that!_ Then what is it like, Ric?”

 _Special,_ he stops himself from saying, because that sounds girly as fuck. It’s not just that he’s touched Shatterstar’s body. He feels sometimes like he’s touched his soul. It’s gotta have something to do with the way their mutant powers resonate off one another, but when they’re together, Rictor feels connected to him in a way that goes _deep, all the way down,_ like his connection to the earth. _There is no one else,_ Star told him once, and he feels it too, kind of: he feels crazy, and complete, and hollow because he knows he’ll never get that with another person. He _knows_ it, but he can’t believe it.

Or maybe he can; that’s what he worries about most, that he and Star’s whole _thing_ is, well… delusional. That they imprinted on each other out of desperation as lonely teens and are still too damaged to make a go at it with anyone else. What does it mean that they’re so good when they’re in battle, on the run, stealing away together like a fucked up mutant Bonnie and Clyde, but so far every attempt they’ve made at living like an actual couple has been miserable?

“I don’t fucking know, Tabby,” he sighs, covering his eyes. “If I did, I wouldn’t still be doing it.”

*

Rictor loves watching Shatterstar work. He gets the feeling that he’s the only person in the world - with the exception of other high-functioning psychos like Domino and, God, fucking Feral (no one rest her soul) - who doesn’t get wigged out watching him fight. He has, in fact, endured a whole lot of unsolicited concern trolling on the part of assholes who didn’t know shit wondering if Star was, yknow, _“okay”_. Mostly assholes Rictor likes.

Even Terry, in their X-Factor days, once said: _“He’s changed a lot, but d’ye ever think that maybe it’s a mite concernin’ how much pleasure he still takes in, ah, this sortae thing. Considerin’ his past an’ all?”_

Star, at the time, was standing about fifteen feet away coated head-to-toe in green blood, washing his swords off with a tenderness usually only seen in the bedroom. He loved a good fight against a tentacle monster; it was so rare that they encountered situations with the sort of black and white morality that allowed him to go all out.

 _“Nah, that’s the thing about his behaviour lately that bugs me the_ least,” Ric had answered honestly.

Because he can tell the difference between when Star is PTSDing the fuck out, and when he’s just taking pleasure in doing the thing he’s best at. And Shatterstar _is_ the best at what he does, Wolverine can eat his hairy, midget heart out.

Well, okay, Ric’s seen Star eat shit plenty of times - against Wolverine himself, even - mostly because of his obnoxiously impenetrable veil of over-confidence. But when the guy’s on his game, he’s _on his game_. And Rictor is never half a good a fighter anywhere else as is he at Shatterstar’s side.

They turn over a warehouse - _just like old times_ \- in thirty minutes flat, Ric feeling out the guard locations through reverberations in the earth and Star incapacitating mooks as fast as Ric can identify their positions. And then they do another, and another - four locations in twice as many hours, one teleport after the third, and another to put distance between them and the alarms that were about to trip once the sun came up. Kill count, two: one each - Ric missed a gunman at the second location and Star had to slit his throat before he could phone home. The other guy - well, Rictor meant to knock him out, but accidentally shook him in a way that had him tripping over his own feet: backwards into a pit and right onto an exposed length of rebar. The dude was dying so slowly and horrifically that Ric jumped down after him and turned his brain to mush to stop the screaming. Yeah, he was gonna be dreaming about that one for a while.

But it happens. Sam wouldn’t have asked for them if he wanted this done above board and with clean hands. The only rules X-Force ever had was that there were no rules.

The sun’s coming up over the Atlantic when they slice across the border into a small, Spanish speaking border-town in Texas that they spent three nights in way back when they left X-Force. The same diner they ate _huevos divorciados_ at their first morning there is still standing, so they go huddle down in the back corner with their map and their stolen ledgers, whispering to each other in a mixture of English and Cadre even though the place is dead empty at 6AM.

Monet once called them the most “ostentatiously raucous” couple she had ever had the displeasure of meeting, but even she’d be impressed by their efficiency as stealth operatives. They were better at it than they were at mass destruction, which they’d been utterly sublime at back in the day. And it made sense: sure, they dressed loud and, yeah, fucked loud, but they bickered quieter than a pair of passive aggressive telepaths, because even when they spent years talking past each other some part of them was still always tuned into the same channel.

They weren’t bickering right now.

“Are you okay?” Shatterstar asks quite matter-of-factly, folding salsa into his egg yolks with one hand while seamlessly marking out their next infiltration route with the other. Rictor pokes at his own meal, still thinking about the rebar going through that guy’s stomach.

“Yeah,” he says, not dishonestly. He’s still shaking a little, and not really as up for the chunky, red salsa he ordered with his breakfast as he thought he would be, but this whole thing isn’t going as bad as he thought it would. “What about you?”

Star’s customary resting-bitch-face turns truly stormy. He eviscerates his second egg as methodically and expertly as he did that man’s throat six hours earlier. “I do not like the deeper implications of this mission. This _Genegineer’s_ work is perverse. It reminds me of -” and here, Star uses a Cadre word that Ric’s ears tend to translate as _“home”,_ but that literally means _“domain of the Spineless Ones”_. The arena slaves had no concept of owning something for themselves. Star still has a hard time with it; Ric’s seen his bedroom at the Manor House, which is conspicuously bare except for the TV and his small, eclectic DVD collection.

Rictor rubs the back of his neck and sighs. “I thought you’d feel that way. It’s fuckin’ monstrous what this shit does to someone. That’s what’s -” _wrong with Rahne,_ he almost says, but stops himself because putting it that way is just going to open an whole other avenue of conversation that he is honestly 100% done with. “The original guy, though - he felt bad about in the end, I guess. Helped us take down the Hodge and everything, as an act of redemption or whatever. His defense was that he just wanted what was best for his people.”

“Hmph,” Star pops a piece of potato in his mouth and chews. “That is what Arize said as well.”

“Yeah,” Ric mutters. He flips through the Cartel ledger some more, adding points on the map as he works through the ciphers. “Man,” he says, a few minutes later. “When I met you, I was still thinking about Genosha every fucking day, you know that?”

Star glances up at him, intrigued. “I knew that you were, as you put it, “all fucked up by it”, but I didn’t realize it weighed so heavily on you.”

Rictor nods, fork in his mouth. His words come out all mull-mouthed around it. “I mean, it just proved to me all the shit I worried about everyday was true, no matter how many pretty words Xavier spun to the papers. It wasn’t the police or the military that rescued me from Hodge, right? It was the fuckin’ X-Men. And that made sense to me ‘cause where I came from the government’s been in bed with folks like my ‘Pa for longer than I’ve been alive. But most of my friends - even, like, _Tabby_ \- believe that _Americano_ shit about people having unalienable rights. They don’t get how easy it is for some rich guy in an office to wave a hand and make you less than human. I always kinda thought -” he drags the fork out of his mouth and starts stirring his salsa around the edge of the plate. “- that Magneto had a point, yeah?”

“Of course Magneto had a point,” Shatterstar replies easily.

Rictor ducks his head and grins. “See, man, this is why I like you. That’s one spicy ass political hot-take I just had there, and you just nod along.”

“I don’t see why it would be a controversial statement. I treasure every day of freedom I experience living here, but Americans do approach the topic very cavalierly. It has always been obvious to me that most of their freedom is an illusion that extends only to a select proportion of the population, and that it is highly dependent on a certain level of material comfort. I see echoes of the Spineless Ones’s madness in every facet of daily life.”

“Yeah, and that’s why I’m glad you fell outta the sky after we were done mucking around in Genosha.”

Star raises an eyebrow - the one above his brand. “I think I would have been an invaluable asset in Genosha.”

“Sure,” Ric rolled his eyes. “You’re always an _“invaluable asset”,_ you smug dick. _Mierda,_ do you ever listen to yourself?”

“Yes,” Star says, not even a little bit contrite. Rictor points his fork at him.

“I was sayin’ that I’m glad you weren’t there for your _own_ sake, Star. Like I said - when we were first getting to know each other, I was still thinkin’ about it every day. And when you started telling me about Mojoworld, I was like: _woof,_ man, that experience would’ve fucked you up worse than you already were. I was glad that you were spared that shit.”

It takes Shatterstar a couple moments to work through exactly what it is Rictor is getting at here, but when he does, the corners of his mouth start turning up. “That’s very sweet, Julio. You are the only person who has ever wanted to protect me.”

He says it in the same factual tone he says basically everything. It takes Rictor a couple moments to work through it as well. That is what he was saying, isn’t it?

“Ah I - I guess so,” he squeaks out, face heating up. Star is folding the map and stacking up their finished dishes, because he would never leave work for the waitress that could be done by hand. He shoots Rictor a smile before taking the plates up to the counter - a big, ol’, face-cracking genuine one. His smiles are so bright and earnest they can light up a whole room; seeing one used to make Ric’s whole month, because that’s about how frequently they happened. His smiles come easy now, but they’re still heart-skippingly beautiful.

 _See,_ Rictor thinks to himself, _we can be friends_.

The problem with that sentiment is that he’s thinking some very unfriendly things, like exactly where on Star’s leathers the hidden zippers are, and how perfectly his hands fit into the dip in his back when he picks him up and carries him to bed, which he never gets sick of doing because it makes him feel super macho to manhandle a guy who’s got half-a-head-and-change on him in height even though it’s just because of Star’s hollow bones that he can lift him at all. The hearse has tinted windows and soundproofing - he could shove Star in back and they could do it right there in the parking lot. It wouldn’t be the most public place they’ve banged, or even the first time they’ve misused X-Factor property in such a way.

 _Maybe we can be friends who fuck,_ he thinks wildly as he shoves a twenty and ten pesos as a tip under the bill. That’s kind of what they were after X-Force, right? And it elides so many of the problems that have plagued them as a couple.

 _Then what is it like?_ Tabby’s asking him again, on repeat, probably sounding more nasal and shrill than she does in real life.

 _It’s like it’s… really fucking complicated!_ Ric shouts back at his own stupid brain, stepping out into the autumn heat.

It’s a crisp morning for so far south - dusty with the scent of burnt asphalt rising as the sun crawls above the house-tops. It hasn’t rained here for weeks probably. This, more than anything, thrusts him back in time half a decade. A lot of things happened in this small, shitty town: Shatterstar’s first sunburn, their fifth make-out session, their last intentional communique with OG X-Force...

Shatterstar is leaning against the car, resting his eyes. Rictor gazes at him for a moment, at his pale face stained the colours of sunrise, at his blonde eyelashes fluttering against his cheekbones, bright as a flame where they brush the black of the slave brand. It’s crazy, now that Ric knows what he’s looking for, how much Star looks like his mother. Which is to say: he looks human. He and Longshot have the same eye colour, the same strange hair texture - thick and coarse, but so light that it practically floats, more like a dog’s coat than human hair. Longshot _looks_ like an alien, though. He’s cut from glass, all impossible angles, almost elfin and glowing at the edges. Shatterstar - if you saw him from the side without the weird eye - just looks like an unusually buff hot guy.

Dazzler’s stage smile is famous, but Ric saw Alison Blaire grin in real life once recently and it almost made him throw up. He’ll never be able to look her in the eye.

Star’s eyes flicker open when Ric slides up beside him. “Our next target is three hours east of León,” he says, dragging a finger across the map. Rictor frowns.

“I think I was there once when I was, like, three.”

“ _‘Think’_ isn’t good enough. We must be precise.”

“Yeah, yeah, I _know_. I remember what it was like tryin’ to get home from Mojoworld.”

A nightmare compounded by the fact that they’d kinda been in the middle of a long, protracted, and ugly as-all-get-out fight before all that Hell on Earth shit hit the fan.

Star’s eyes crinkle at the corners. “Do you?”

Rictor stares at him. “... what does that mean?”

“We will have to teleport in somewhere near Guadalajara,” Star says, just sidestepping all that bullshit like he’s doing fucking ballet. “I’m sorry, Julio, but we can’t afford to botch a teleport, especially since the Cartel we are tracking will be on guard after our raids last night.”

“Y-yeah.” Just hearing the name of the city he was born in puts a tear in his gut. Ric wrenches his hands together and stares at his boots.

“I will have to rest afterwards.”

“Sure. The back of the hearse is just as comfy as we left it. I’ll keep watch.”

“And then you will rest as well.”

“Don’t worry about me, dude, I brought enough 5-hour energy drinks to keep me wired into the next century.”

Shatterstar starts tutting like a little old _abuelita_. “Don’t be ridiculous, Rictor. Aside from my concerns about those drinks’ effect on your health, which we have discussed many times, we must both be operating at peak efficiency for what we’re about to do. Your refusal to rest endangers both of us, as well as the overall success of the mission. Losing this lead could mean disastrous results for mutants all over the world.”

Rictor is about to cut into this rant with a snort and a _“nag, nag nag”,_ but halfway through, Star’s gaze gets distracted and starts tracking something across the empty lot. Ric follows his eyes and catches what has occupied him: two boys - about seventeen or eighteen - obviously stumbling back into town after a night of either drinking or smoking up. They’re holding hands, like - _hardcore_ holding hands in a way that cannot be interpreted as anything but _infatuated_. One of them takes a drag off his cigarette and leans over to kiss the smoke into his boyfriend’s mouth. They fall into the diner, snickering to each other in Spanish.

Star’s eyebrows are all knit together and Ric breaks out into a cold sweat because he knows that Star basically has a photographic memory and they’re about two blocks away from a place that Ric slapped his hands away when he tried to touch him in public, a thing that he still did more often than not even when they were officially “dating” as adults. 

Old habits die hard. Star told him once that he was a dick when they were around other people. Which was ridiculous: he was a dick when they were alone too.

He pulls an anxious hand through his hair and puts his foot as far down his throat as he can get it. “M-man, it’s crazy how so much has changed in such a short time, huh?”

“Mmm,” Star replies.

“Like, being gay was considered such an anomaly when we were kids no one even thought twice about us practically braidin’ each other’s hair in the X-Mansion. Good thing, I guess, ‘cause _man,_ we were obvious. These days, everyone would’ve known.”

Shatterstar regards him for a long, serious moment. He says: “I would have liked it if everyone had known.” And then he gets in the car.

Rictor stands outside for a while, hand still in his hair, eyes fixed on the sky. “ _Madre de dios,_ ” he groans. So fucking much for being friends.

 

**(3).**

Star once said - well, didn’t say, more like threw down in the middle of a fucking apocalypse level argument, all bland and innocent - he said: _“Julio, of the top ten most satisfactory sexual encounters I have had in my life, I would count at least eight of them as having been with you.”_

All Rictor could do was boggle at him. _“Wh-what -!?”_ And drop his beer. _“What’s number one?”_ he asked. In Spanish. They tried not to argue in Spanish.

 _“The second time,”_ Star answered easily, and with a complicated expression.

Not the first time. That was - well, it _was_ -

*

They get ambushed four miles outside Guadalajara because Ric’s been getting good leads from his cousin Yolanda, and so he gets complacent. He and Yolanda had been close as kids, in the sense that she was two years older and always used to pick on him for being short and scrawny and bad at football. When she noticed how het up he got when she hit on Star she just flashed him a chipped-lipstick grin and said: _“Oh, I always knew, Juli.”_ That’s the last conversation they ever have.

They find her at their contact point - tied to a chair, beaten to death, her face peeled off and a plaque with the word _“chismoso”_ scrawled on it nailed to her chest. It’s true: Yolanda had always been a gossip. Rictor could’ve kept his own mouth damn shut and she’d still be alive. There’s no time to give her a proper burial because Star’s already sticking his swords in people Rictor would rather put in jail. They flee a hail of bullets and go eastward, sloshing through a muddy, garbage filled river for what feels like hours until Ric’s uncle sends a fucking _helicopter_ after them. So much for _Richter Familia Values_.

Shatterstar throws himself in front of Rictor with his swords crossed. Ric grabs his shoulders and feels him humming, feels the feedback from his weapons rock through him as two blades of light slice through the night air. The blast shatters the bullets, but goes wide of the ‘chopper itself. Ric pries his eyes open to see it listing in the air, but recovering ground quickly. Star almost doubles over - bleeding from the stomach and shaking all over from the toll using his powers takes on his body - but the stupid asshole never stays down. He staggers to his feet and starts humming again, louder this time, loud enough that Ric can hear it over the roar of the helicopter blades.

He’s afraid Star’s gonna blow his fucking chest open so in a panic he reaches out and grabs the hilts of his swords. Feels the biometric feedback try to buzz him off and pushes back. The shockwave that jolts out of the blades is so powerful it disintegrates the chopper upon contact, turning it to particle and flame that lights up the night like a fireworks display. Shatterstar careens around in the knee-deep water and stares at Rictor - eyes wide, nose bleeding, every part of him turned to stark light and shadow by the fire. Rictor’s seeing through straight him like he’s made of fault lines and dark matter, the same way he can see the tectonic ley lines under the earth when he _really_ lets loose. He could pick out the frequency that ties Star to the earth the same way he can trigger a quake right now and it’s making the world turn hazy and indistinct around him. He wants to fold himself into Shatterstar’s arms right there, roll around in the mud until they’re part of the planet herself. But that’s crazy thinking, the battle high talking, they have to -

\- they run until they’re certain they aren’t being followed anymore, find a cave to crawl into until it’s day again. They sit face to face and clean each other up. Rictor’s trying to dig a bullet out from under Star’s ribcage, but he can’t stop shaking. Pebbles are vibrating around him in a fifteen foot radius. Star grabs his hands to steady them and gasps. There’s a secondary aftershock from combining their powers rattling through them, so strong that Ric sees white for five whole seconds. There’s still an aura around Shatterstar, blinking bright where the moon illuminates his features, like daylight bouncing off a mirror. There are little diamonds crackling in his hair. Rictor realizes that he’s literally _seeing_ Star’s mutant powers, and it’s making him more unbearably beautiful than usual.

He rubs his thumbs along the inner heel of Star’s hands, over the bones in his wrists, and Star whimpers. He runs his palms up the tensed muscles in his arms, into the hollow of his neck to cup his face, and Star makes a noise like he’s being tortured. He presses their foreheads together and rasps: “I want you inside me.”

“I am,” Star replies, voice trembling. Rictor’s never heard his voice tremble before. His chest is soaked in blood, and not all of it is his.

“No, not like -” Ric screws his eyes shut and sighs. Shatterstar is brilliant in almost every sense of the word, but sometimes he’s also the dumbest motherfucker on the planet. At his core he’s a kinesthetic learner. Rictor kisses him, as hard as he can, and shows him what he means.

“I keep fucking everything up,” he says later, with a gasp. Star is still moving inside him, clumsy, uncertain. Rhythm unsteady. It hurts, and it’s hot as hell - way fucking hotter than if he’d been good at it right away, the way he always was in Rictor’s fantasies.

Star grips his hip comfortingly. “We are both “fucking up”, Julio” he assures, and Ric can hear the quotation marks around _“fucking up”_ , which is an absolutely absurd way to speak while he was literally fucking someone. Under any other circumstances, Rictor would have burst out laughing.

Instead he covers his face with both hands and says: “I’m sorry,” because he’s sweaty and shaking and crying like a little girl and losing his fucking virginity on a slab of hard-ass rock and it’s all too much and not nearly _enough_.

Star stops, slides halfway out of him, which feels worse than being penetrated did, makes him feel every inch of unpleasant friction caused by using spit as lube, and from being so afraid of being gay he’d only stuck a finger up his ass once and even then wussed out before he figured out how to make it feel good. Star is peeling his hands away from his face, but he’s still too bright to look at. It’s almost pitch dark in the cave; the only light is from Star’s white eye, from a single beam of moonlight reflecting off it, catching the tips of his red hair on fire.

“I adore you,” he whispers, pinning Ric’s wrists to the ground.

Rictor licks his lips. “Uh, wh-what?” he asks stupidly. Star smiles, kisses him, and thrusts back in with such brutal precision that Rictor comes on the spot.

Yup. _Definitely_ a kinesthetic learner.

They don’t talk the entire hike back to the truck, or the drive out of state. But when they’re at the next motel it’s like a dam’s burst. Using his mutant powers twice in one night has tapped out Star’s healing factor and he has to wait around for his cuts and bruises to heal like a normal person. So they fuck to pass the time. Star’s right, all those years in the future: the second time was perfect. Slow, quiet, tender, in a bed with all the proper equipment and everything. The third, fourth, fifth and sixth times aren’t bad either. It all blurs together after that; they have months and months of significant eye-contact, blushy hand-touching and tentatively feverish make-out sessions to make good on, and holy shit, do they _ever_. Rictor’s back is pressed against the adobe tile of the bathroom floor when he says: “Dude, I don’t think I can stand up. I think you fucked me so hard that time I’m paralyzed from the waist down.”

Shatterstar pushes up on his elbows, eyes wide and alarmed. “Julio!” he starts, but Rictor covers his mouth and starts laughing.

“I’m joking! I’m just joking, amigo! _Dios,_ your face!”

“It’s not funny, Julio,” Star says seriously, but he sounds about ten fucking years old muffled under Rictor’s palm. Calmly, he removes the hand. “Humans are fragile and I am severely inexperienced in these matters. I _could_ hurt you.” 

“Christ, Star, I’m not made of glass.” Ric rolls his eyes and struggles to raise himself up. He fails, falls flat on the tile and blows his sweaty hair out of his face. “I endured Cable’s training protocols too, y’know.”

Star gives him a strange look, then rolls to his feet with inhuman grace. With the same inhuman grace, he scoops Rictor off the floor - ignoring his squawk of protest - and deposits him on the bed furthest from the window. They’ve been sharing a bed this whole time, even before they realized how easy it was just to _do_ this. God, they wasted so much time. Rictor fumbles around for a pair of boxers and struggles into them, then buries his face in a pillow to doze off. Star sits beside him and flips the TV on, volume low. A familiar hum that starts to lull Ric under.

Except that there’s something wrong. Star’s flipping through the channels lazily, lingering on commercials, letting whole subplots develop before surfing to another show. It sounds like he’s lost in thought. Rictor raises his chin and sees his friend staring at the window, where the sunset is coming in red through the clay blinders. Ric fumbles for his knee. “What’s wrong?” he mumbles.

“Go to sleep,” Star responds, voice clipped and distant. “You require more rest to recoup your injuries than I do. I will keep watch.”

“Oh my _Goooood,_ ” Rictor groans. “I can’t stand it when you’re like this. Just fuckin’ talk to me, man.”

Shatterstar drops the remote, casts his eyes towards the floor. He hesitates, because his only methodology for being dishonest is to shut his trap as tight as possible. “It occurs to me that you may have thrown yourself so vigorously into our sexual congress these past few days because you require a distraction from what happened to your cousin outside Guadalajara. And furthermore, you have been attempting to, in turn, distract _me_ from figuring this out.”

Star looks at him, and Rictor can only blink in bewilderment. Suddenly his mouth is dry. He realizes he’s probably dehydrated too, but that’s not why his stomach just turned itself inside out. “Um. Y-yeah,” he murmurs. “It’s a little bit that.”

An near-unreadable look flashes across Star’s face, but Rictor gets it: a little angry, a lot _hurt_. He can’t hide it the way he used to. Probably because he didn’t used to feel it. Or he didn’t think he felt it, _whatever_. He goes to stand, but Ric grabs his wrist and pulls him back down.

“It’s not only that.”

“Then what is it?” Star demands, terse, cornered. It’s a tone of voice Rictor hasn’t heard in months. Ric pushes up so that they’re eye level and takes a lock of Star’s hair between his fingers. He just twirls it, and stares at the space between them.

“I thought this would happen if we ran away together,” he says quietly. “I wanted it to happen.”

“Is that what we’ve done?” Shatterstar repeats it slowly. “Run away together?”

Rictor nods.

“And will you run again? Away _from_ me?”

“I -” Star’s hair is so silky, in a weird, animalistic way. It’s streaked gold at the tips from the sun. “What the hell kinda question is that, Star?”

He’s pouting. “You did it before. Are you scared of me?”

Rictor smiles sadly.“No. Not of you. Never of you. I’m scared of… of, y’know, of _this,_ ” he gestures between them, at how they’re both still mostly naked. “Of what other people would think about it. What they’ll think about me. _Madre mia,_ the shit I’ve said about gay people -”

Star snorts, nose in the air. “Hmph. I’ll never understand human sexual prejudices.” 

“Yeah, well you’ve only just figured out you can desire sex at all. But this is a pretty big deal, okay?”

“I know it is a “pretty big deal”.” Shatterstar says, suddenly fierce. He grabs boths Rictor’s hands and grips them tight. “Julio. This is a _prettier bigger_ “deal” than anything I have ever experienced. What has transpired between us is significant on a level that I find impossible to put into words.”

“Than _anything_ you’ve experienced? Dude, there’s no way I’m that good in bed.”

Star huffs, and squeezes tighter. “While your habit of deflecting serious topics with a pithy remark is an annoying personality tic I normally find endearing, this is a highly inappropriate time to deploy this conversational trope.”

“I am being serious!” Ric tugs one of his hands free so he can rake it through his hair. He’s shaking, and not just from exhaustion. “I-I mean, on one hand I understand you man, I know you, but on the other hand… sometimes it’s a little hard to get what you see in me. You’re like, a superstar rebel freedom fighter from another dimension. Everyone on Mojoworld talked about you like you were the Second Coming”

“And to what end?” Shatterstar’s vision unfocuses, fixed on something hazy just over Ric’s shoulder. “I was Mojo’s puppet. The Cadre used me as a sword. Cable - while he had his reasons for it - used me as if I were one of his _fekting_ guns. What worth did I have then?” His eyes snap back to Rictor, and his gaze bores into him. “Accompanying you on this personal mission is the only path I have ever chosen for myself. Being by your side is the only thing that has ever made me value my own life.”

Rictor laughs airily, but he can’t break eye contact. “Uh, yeah, that’s not freakin’ me out any less.”

“Julio,” Shatterstar breathes, leaning their foreheads together. “What happened the other night… I felt that. In here -” he touches the center of his chest. “In my _uemeur_. Do you understand?”

The room feels too small, too dark, too bright. There’s not enough air, or space, or anything really, in the world for what it feels like when Rictor remembers that Mojoworld magic makes it so that Star has a for-real literal soul that he’s, like, _seen_ once before. He _felt_ it? What the hell does that mean? He tries to laugh it off, but his giggles are sounding more and more desperate, even to his own ears. “Oh, c’mon, even _you_ know this is a cliche, dude. All teens think the person they lose their virginity to is their soul-mate.”

He regrets saying it out loud the moment it leaves his lips. Now he’s the only one he can blame if the idea gets into Star’s head. He’s always doing that - putting ideas into Star’s head that he has to pay for later.

Shatterstar doesn’t follow up on it, however. He just asks - deadpan, and a little sad: “You don’t feel it?”

Rictor stops breathing for a moment. The light is turning blue in the motel room, casting everything in a gentle, white glow. He thinks of the other night, of their sonic frequencies humming in harmony. Of the way Star was ready to die for him, is always ready to die for a cause that he thinks is worth it, as a matter of pride and principle. Thinks about how he still doesn’t get the necessity of cooking food before you eat it, about how his taste in civilian clothes grows tackier the longer he’s out from under Cable’s buttoned-up thumb, about how he’ll put pineapple in fucking everything if not stopped, about how they always have to go to the earliest matinees possible when seeing a movie in theaters because he’ll talk loudly through the whole thing, questioning the logic of the characters as if they’re real people because he _still has a hard time with that_. He thinks about how just a year ago he caught Shatterstar petulantly hacking a frustrated trench into the wall of their training room at Campe Verde because he couldn’t read the hands on the clock, and now he’s the one who scolds Rictor for getting impatient in line at McDonald’s.

He pulls Star close and kisses him: softly, sweetly and with more than a little heat. 

“What the _hell_ kinda question is that?”

 

**(9).**

Julio did not sleep, but he’s trying to pass it off as if he has. He is extremely obvious, as he is in most things, with his bloodshot eyes and his trailing sentences full of unnecessary details. His hands are vibrating on the steering wheel as he veers them off-road towards the abandoned laboratory they’re due to investigate next.

This is the kind of unprofessional obstinance that keeps Julio off the headline X-Men teams, an accusation that would probably fill him with pride if slung at him any other time. In this specific circumstance, the mission is far too important for Julio to have a highly internalized emotional meltdown in the middle of it. Shatterstar feels that he is partly to blame, however. Likely, Julio spent his designated four hours of rest-time fretting about the exchange they had outside the diner. This outcome was predictable as Shatterstar had meant the words to dig under the skin. Many people - Layla and Neena of course, as well as Rahne, Theresa, Monet, Tabitha, Illyana Rasputin and even James once - have accused him of “letting” Julio “get away” with far too much, so he has made a point of allowing himself to be verbally irritated with Julio when he does something irritating.

He was irritated by Julio’s deflection about the public-facing aspect of their lapsed relationship. He is _furious_ about the 5-hour energy drink. He decides to stay quiet about that. Julio’s health is technically “none of his business”.

_That’s what being broken up is, Star._

The _rules_ of being "broken up" with someone are far more complex and contradictory than any of the arcane axioms that applied to active relationships. Especially when it was clear to him that Julio did not actually want to be broken up at all. His body-language indicated that their physical attraction was still mutual, and he studiously self-sabotaged every date he’d been on since they “called it quits”. The whole situation was absurd. If these factors were not in play, Shatterstar could accept that perhaps it was time for the parameters of their relationship to change once again and adjust his expectations and emotional responses accordingly. As it was, Julio seemed to be - as Monet once said - “keeping him on the hook”.

It was pointless and irresponsible to speculate about this while they had work to do.

The evidence gathered in Oaxaca suggested that the new mutate serum had been brewed onsite at a drug lab somewhere out on the mesa in Guanajuato. Their teleportation route takes them so close to Guadalajara that they can see the distinctive shadow of the city center on the horizon. Julio stares at it sadly for a few minutes before revving the engine and driving them in the opposite direction.

The sun is going down again by the time they arrive at their destination. The lab is an old steel mill, caved in all down the western wall, grey and silent against the sunset. Rubble dots the sloping landscape like teeth in a broken jaw. 

“I don’t feel shit, dude,” Julio says, cheek to the earth. “It’s definitely abandoned.”

“Are you certain? You’ve made a mistake once already.”

Julio huffs as he pushes off the ground. “In that case, I guess you can just take care of it for me, _amigo_.”

“Don’t I always?” Shatterstar asks absently, hating the way pettiness sounds and feels on his tongue. Julio - all black-tempered and jittering caffeine nerves - lets out a long string of Spanish expletives through his teeth and leads the way.

The entrance has been destroyed, so they’re forced to enter through a crack in the back wall. Julio grabs an exposed piece of steel piping and swings himself inside, leather jacket disappearing into the black shadows like ink into the ocean. Shatterstar perches on the outcropping and scans the interior with his enhanced night vision before leaping after him.

Julio was right, apparently. The lab is _quite_ abandoned.

They split up to cover opposite sides of the work floor. Shatterstar overturns metal tubs and pries rubble away from the rusting machinery. Julio works the makeshift office-space over with black-light and other tools from what he likes to call his _“Mission Impossible Rig”_. It was always an unspoken secret at X-Factor that Julio had taken to Detective work better than any of then, especially Madrox. Shatterstar had pointed it out once, and Layla threatened to have him flayed alive if he ever said it where Jamie could hear.

“Holy shit,” Julio is saying from his side of the room. “Star, you aren’t gonna believe this -”

Shatterstar chooses not to grease the wheels of Julio’s verbal thought-train. He’s more concerned with the literal grease he’s found on the defunct mill’s conveyor belt, which looks newly used. 

“- I’m serious, I’m gettin’ some wild readings over here. How are you -”

He swipes a gloved finger through the oil and finds that it’s still wet. Julio’s ranting somewhere behind him, but he ignores it in favour of hopping the conveyor belt and following the oil leak further into the warehouse. There was no reason for them to have been using the smelting equipment if they were merely preparing a neural serum.

Julio’s stomping his way across the concrete. “Hey, _tonto,_ would you fuckin’ talk to me already?” he demands. Shatterstar glances over his shoulder to see his friend looking rather put out and shadow-drenched. He’s holding a plastic bag full of cracked vials in one hand and a geiger counter in the other. It’s clicking away, relentless, like a physical manifestation of the testy mood between them. “This place is _bleedin’_ low level radiation.”

“This machinery has been recently in use. As little as a week ago.”

“Oh _ho,_ ” Julio cocks his head to one side. “Were you plannin’ on keeping that all to yourself, big guy? You know that communication is the foundation of detective work, right?”

“Relationships as well, I thought,” Shatterstar says flatly before diving back into the rubble. Julio clips the geiger counter to his belt and follows after him, breathing heavy. Not like he’s exerting himself, more like he’s counting to ten so he won’t, quote unquote, “freak out”.

“I can’t believe this is the first time we’ve talked in months and we’re wasting it fighting over shit I did when I was eighteen,” he grumbles.

“I’m not upset about what you said in Texas. I am upset because you are subsisting on caffeine when I explicitly suggested you take a nap.” Shatterstar, politely, refrains from pointing out that Julio was the one who facilitated the circumstances by which they have not talked for several months.

“ _Joder,_ you’re serious right now. We’re actually fighting about the fucking 5-hour energy drink?”

“Yes,” Shatterstar affirms, lifting a singed chunk of concrete by the rebar. He finds a sliver of slick, unmarked metal beneath it and dips to pick it up. It is seamless and cool to the touch. “You wasted several hours of mission time being distraught over the wrong thing.”

“The wrong thing?” Julio echoes.

“Yes. You are often distraught over the wrong things.” 

“For fuck’s sake, Shatterstar. I don’t get it, I really don’t. Sometimes it’s like… you _get_ me on a level no one else ever has, but you never freakin’ understand _why_ I’m upset!”

“I understand the reasons you get upset, I just think they are absurd. You work very hard to make yourself miserable, and I see no reason for that.”

“Are you saying I _like_ to be miserable?”

Shatterstar turns to stare at him, face blank. “Don’t you?”

Julio throws his arms up in the air.

“What would you rather fight about, Julio?”

“Literally fucking _anything_ but this.”

Shatterstar takes this under consideration, turning the metal shard over in his hands. He tosses it to Julio, and says: “I am sorry, but Star Wars is better than Star Trek.”

Julio catches it, but his expression is gouged wide with shock and betrayal. “What the hell? I told you before, Star, they’re completely different genres, so you can’t compare -”

“You have made this claim, yes, but obviously you prefer Star Trek.”

“Uh, yeah, ‘cause Star Trek is better.”

“See - the genre claim was a rhetorical feint on your part because you know that when pit against each other on objective artistic merits, your favourite can’t compete.”

“No, it’s because they’re trying to accomplish totally different things!” Julio is gesturing wildly now, metal shard catching the blade of moonlight above him and blinkering off it like a strobe effect. “I mean, I ain’t knocking the original trilogy, but it’s just space wizard good an’ evil bullshit. Star Trek is philosophical - it _means_ something, man.”

“I disagree. Star Trek may have meant something in its original context, but thirty to fifty years later and already the messages have loss potency and relevance. The stark hyper-reality of Star Wars is malleable across generations, and highly suggestible to projected interpretations.”

“Oh, here you go again. You can fuck right off with your ‘simplicity is actually always deeper’ bullshit, Mr. Three Second Attention Span.”

“Are you going to defend _Enterprise_ to me, Rictor?”

Julio makes several ridiculous noises with his mouth. Then he says: “You know, you can be really childish sometimes.”

“As you like to frequently remind me, I quite literally have the emotional maturity of a seven year old.” Shatterstar keeps picking through the rubble, voice as placid as a frozen lake. “You, however, have been in emotional development for nearly twenty-five years and are still childish almost all of the time. And yet, I do not hold this against you.”

He can feel Julio’s eyes on him. “Can’t you just let me get the last word in here _once_?” he sighs.

“No. As with a real battle, I will show no mercy when quarreling.”

Julio starts laughing. Shatterstar whips around to glare at him. “What?”

“Oh, nothing. Nothing.” Julio waves it off. “It’s just… you’re cute. I forget sometimes how cute you are.”

“Cute,” he repeats slowly. Of all the colourful adjectives applied to him on his hundreds of advertising spots, ‘cute’ had never been one of them. If only the Master Programmer could see him now.

“Yeah,” Julio sets a hand on his hip and leers. “Cute _and_ childish. I can’t believe everyone used to be scared shitless of you.”

Shatterstar raises his chin haughtily, but he can’t hide the mischievous glint in his good eye. “If anyone else spoke to me the way you do, Julio Richter, I would kill him where he stood.”

“Uh huh. And you know that I’ve _never_ been scared of you.”

Of course. Julio was no longer the _only,_ but he would always be the first, the _first,_ the one who -

His expression softens. “Yes. That is why -”

The ground shifts beneath them suddenly - a low rumble that cracks the dust from the eaves above and rattles the old gears in the smelting equipment. Their eyes meet, because they both know Julio’s powers feel _nothing_ like this. It happens again - closer this time - and _again,_ like footsteps.

Julio is staring at the metal in his hands. Shatterstar is staring at the geiger counter, which is ticking up cacophonously the nearer the steps draw to the building.

“No fucking way,” Julio whispers. Outside, a dull metal whine booms through the night, sick and familiar, warped like how combustion sounds when stretched deep by the doppler effect. It’s a noise that used to be familiar to mutants in the United States, before reactionaries found more subtle ways of handling the rogue population.

“Do you think -”

“It could be,” Shatterstar nods. They steal towards the nearest window and there it is, shambling out of the horizon: a Sentinel, classic model, following its own footsteps back to the factory.

Julio whistles. “Nice. All the greatest one hit wonders of the last decade are here. Don’t they know that the hip thing right now is puttin’ nanomachine sleeper agents in the Norms, or just good ol’ fashion face-to-face hate crimes?”

They stare at each other, and Shatterstar’s heart lifts as he realizes that he and Julio are thinking the exact same thing. He adores this feeling - gazing into Julio’s dark eyes and knowing that their thoughts and hearts are perfectly aligned. It makes his _uemeur_ sing.

“Shall we?” he asks, snapping his swords out of their holsters.

Julio grins like wildfire and sets his hands to the ground.

 

**(6).**

Upon returning from Nation X, Guido suggests that they order pizza “as a family”. Shatterstar is half-way through his unassailable argument for procuring at least one unit with pineapple when Julio grabs him by the back of his coat and drags him upstairs to their bedroom. He slams the door behind them, and stands with his hands on his hips.

“I know that you have a strong antipathy towards pineapple on pizza, but it was unnecessary to remove me from the kitchen.”

Julio makes a harsh noise out of his nose. “Oh, it was plenty fuckin’ necessary. I got some shit to say and I’m not gonna yell at you in front of everyone else. Unlike you, I care about not embarrassing my boyfriend in public!”

Shatterstar puts a finger to his mouth and runs through his memories of the day. Ah. Of course. “Julio, I was being honest when I said that it was not my intention to solicit sex from Northstar. While he possesses a certain unique beauty, I have heard many things that imply he is also very… _difficult_.”

Julio curls his lip, furious.

“Difficult in a different way than you are,” Shatterstar clarifies. “I like the way in which you are difficult.”

This was the wrong thing to say. “You think I’m being _difficult_ right now!?”

“No, I -”

Julio chops a hand through the air angrily. “Star, I told you - more than once - to cool your fuckin’ heels on this open relationship shit until I figure out how I feel about it.”

Yes. Julio seems to have an inherent misunderstanding of the concept in which he believes that it is something Shatterstar wants to do apart from him, rather than _with_ him. Which is why he has _“cooled his heels”_ on it. “I already told you that I did not intend to have sex with anyone.”

“Yeah, so that’s why you stuck your tongue halfway down Tabby’s throat?”

Shatterstar shrugs. “She asked.”

“Man, she didn’t even notice how uncomfortable I was. Figures! Tabs never changes - she’s always been such a self-absorbed bi -”

“Julio, do not misdirect anger you feel at me towards Tabitha.”

“I’m pissed at you _both!_ ” Julio shouts. “If you’re not trying sleep around, then why do you keep hitting on everything that moves!?”

Oh. Suddenly the problem has become clear. Julio views the two activities as inexorably linked. “You want me to stop flirting with other people?”

“What? Are you tellin’ me you can’t do that?”

Shatterstar looks down and works through this for a few moments. Sex with only Julio is acceptable, however he very much enjoys kissing and flirtation. It is still novel to him that there are so many ways to interact with the world outside of violence, and that he can hone these skills the same way he does his battle tactics. On several metrics, they are even more valuable than martial techniques because they also benefit other people. Additionally, Julio does not like to be flirted with, so in order to make this compromise, he would have to abandon the practice entirely.

“Why the fuck is it taking you so long to respond?”

“You are asking me to give up something I enjoy doing. I am weighing the pros and cons before giving you a definitive answer.”

“Shit man, you just don’t get it. I _hate_ trailin’ after you making sure you’re not gonna go home with any asshole who makes eyes at you -”

“I would never want to “go home” with anyone but you.”

“Yeah, well you sure don’t do a great job demonstratin’ that.”

Shatterstar looks around the room. It is dark, and the laughter from downstairs has grown faint as the team has retreated to the common room. “Would you like me to demonstrate right now?”

“ _Madre mia,_ you are fucking _impossible_ sometimes! Sex isn’t gonna make me feel better right now!” 

Julio shoves him. Not hard enough to even come close to hurting him, but hard enough that Shatterstar dances back a few steps and Julio seems shocked he did it at all. So he does it again. Shatterstar catches his wrists this time and then, because Julio has a wild look in his eye like he wants to be kissed, he kisses him. Julio resists for about two seconds and then he’s kissing back ferociously, all teeth and fingernails.

“O-okay, I lied.” Julio’s fingers are digging marks into his neck that would likely remain for hours if not for his healing factor. “Sex will make me feel a little better.”

“What about the pizza?” Based on previous experience, it will arrive before they are finished.

Julio rolls his eyes all the way back. “I don’t care about the _fucking pizza_.”

Shatterstar nods. He nestles a hand in the curve of his spine and dips him back _all_ the way, like he saw recently in an old black and white Hepburn film. Julio goes boneless in his arms, trusting that Shatterstar will hold him up. That is always far more arousing that the physical stimulation of kissing. Julio does not trust anyone, for many understandable reasons, yet he allows himself to be vulnerable in Shatterstar’s arms even when he is upset with him. This is the most precious thing he’s found on Earth yet.

“Uh, u-um, hey,” Julio breathes when they part again. “I don’t mind if you’re, y’know, rough with me. I… I’m kind of into that, so -”

Shatterstar needs to gather his senses in order to process that statement, as he was rather taken away by the kissing as was, without any “roughness” involved. He studies Julio’s face - his blown out pupils, his unkempt facial hair, the way his throat is bobbing as he swallows each breath, thick with anticipation. He has to replay the words back to himself to get the subtext: He is talking about something he has experienced before. Something he has asked to have done to himself.

He drops Julio on the floor.

“Ow! What the hell, Star! I didn’t mean like that, I meant like -” he massages his tailbone with one hand while gesticulating angrily with the other. “- like, in a _sexy_ way!”

Shatterstar crosses his arms. “Who has done this to you?”

“What?”

“Who has treated you _“roughly”_.”

Julio rolls his eyes again. “Nice, after all that shit you put me through today, now _you’re_ the jealous one?”

“I’m not jealous. I’m concerned that you have been mistreated and taken advantage of in our time apart.”

“Jesus fucking Chri -” Julio stumbles to his feet, sputtering. “I can’t believe this - sorry to disappoint you, Star, but I didn’t keep an itemized list of my drunken one night stands on the off chance that you’d show up again and want to challenge them all to fuckin’ mortal combat, or whatever the hell is going through your head right now. I don’t even remember half their names.”

“You have been treated _“roughly”_ by multiple men whose names you don’t even know, but you have an irrational hang up about either of us sharing a positive, consensual encounter with someone else.”

It’s not a question. It’s an observation. But one that begs an answer.

Julio blinks a couple times, then gets mad again. “Oh, _vete a la mierda_ \- I can’t deal with you right now.” He starts stalking towards the door, hands in the air. “I’m going out for a drink. Fucking go room with Layla or Monet or whoever’ll have you, I don’t wanna see you for a bit when I get back. I -”

Shatterstar cuts him off by grabbing his arm and wheeling him around. The force with which he does so stuns Julio silent. They stare at each other in the half-light, Julio’s eyes peeling wide. He’s paying attention now, in a way he wasn’t during their argument. Shatterstar says nothing as he slowly walks him towards the bed. He goes down easy when his legs hit the baseboard, eyes wide, body pliant, hands limp beneath where Shatterstar is holding his arms. He pulls in a sharp breath when Shatterstar brushes his lips against the pulse-point of one wrist - so gently there’s barely any heat between their skin - and doesn’t let it out until he starts to suck a mark into it.

“Star, I -” his voice is already cracked hoarse with desire from just that. 

Whatever he’s about to say is cut off by the sound of one of Shatterstar’s swords singing out of its wrist holster. He lifts the hem of Julio’s shirt with the blade and slides it up between the fabric and the skin, taking care that the metal only grazes Julio’s chest. Close enough that he can feel the hum of the current that runs through it without getting stung by the feedback. When the tip of the sword grazes Julio’s chin, he tilts the blade and cuts the shirt in two, as easily as heated wire cuts through butter.

Julio takes a deep, unsteady breath, his whole body trembling like a leaf. “Uh so, gotta be honest here, I’ve never been more turned on in my life, b-but -”

Shatterstar retracts the sword and follows its path with a gloved hand, cupping his neck with the amount of tenderness and care one should use when moving a wounded animal. Sam once said that the closed fist can be used to protect as well.

“L-listen,” Julio is saying. “J-just -”

Shatterstar covers his mouth. “Just _nothing,_ Julio,” he murmurs. “If you have no one for me to defend your honour against, I suppose I can persuade you another way.”

Julio gazes up at him with watery eyes, his brow crumpled in exasperation. But he’s nodding _‘okay’_. Vigorously.

He starts by licking into the hollow of Julio’s throat, and he goes as slow and _soft_ as he can.

*

“ _Dios Mio,_ ” Julio is saying later, an arm slung across his face. “Mary Mother of Christ, holy fuckin shi -” he pauses to catch his breath, then says: “ _Fekt_.”

Shatterstar grins into his collarbone. “ _Fekt,_ ” he agrees.

“Man, for the first time I’m actually glad that crazy chick from the Avengers turned me Sap. If I still had my powers right now, I would’ve brought the whole house down.”

Yes, that had been the intent. Shatterstar rolls up on his elbows and stares down at Julio seriously. “I hope I have adequately demonstrated that violence and intensity are not necessarily synonymous.”

“Y-yeah, yeah, I get it. Strange fuckin’ lesson to come from _you_ of all places, but -”

He wasn’t finished: “Then you will not longer seek out sexual self harm in your encounters with other men?”

The serenity drains from Julio’s expression and the afterglow sucks right out of the room. “Wh-wha, what -” Julio is boggling at him. “I’m not _seeking out_ other men _period,_ that’s what this whole thing was - that’s what I was _trying_ to -” He smacks a palm off his forehead. “We really need to stop having sex in the middle of arguments.”

“Why?” They have always argued, and they have almost always had sex. Shatterstar fails to see why these would suddenly be mutually exclusive aspects of their relationship. “It is a productive way to blow off gas.”

“Blow off steam, Star,” Julio mutters. “Come the fuck on, you’ve been on Earth for like six years. You gotta be doing it on purpose at this point.”

Shatterstar smiles. He was doing it on purpose. “Are we going to have another argument?”

“ _Dios,_ no - look, here’s the problem: we always get halfway into the issue, and then we fuck, and then we forget what the hell we were even arguing about in the first place and fall asleep and so we never resolve _shit!_ Rinse, repeat. I’m gettin’ sick of it.”

The exhaustion in his voice is palpable, and worrying. Shatterstar bolts up in the bed, sheet tumbling off his bare shoulders. “I remember exactly what we were arguing about. We may resume the conversation if you wish.”

The look Julio affixes him with is positively withering. “Star…”

“In fact, I would very much like to resolve our “shit” as soon as possible.”

Julio groans and drags a pillow over his face. “Ugh, you - _madre_ \- not right now, okay? I’m dead on my feet after all that.”

Shatterstar can’t stop himself from smiling again. “Luckily you are laying down, Julio.”

Julio hits him with the pillow next. Then he rolls over and yawns. He’s asleep within minutes - a true, deep sleep, the kind he doesn’t often experience. His nightmares can’t shake the walls anymore, but Shatterstar still finds him tossing and turning almost every night. It seems worse now than when they were younger. A lot of things seem to have gotten worse since they were younger, and not just because Julio has lost his powers. He’s the one who told Shatterstar to figure himself out, but he does not seem to have taken his own advice.

He stays for a while, watching the rise and fall of Julio’s shoulders and the subtle movement of his eyes beneath closed lids. Then he pulls on a sweater and pair of pants and pads down to the kitchen to make himself hot chocolate.

He goes to the roof of the funeral home and sits at the edge, mug cooling in his hands. New York is lit up beneath him, as vibrant and alive beneath the midnight smoke as it is at high noon. Some of his best and worst memories are in this city, and because of that he holds it in special regard. It’s a strange thing to consider - that he’s been so many places in his life that he has detailed and varied opinions on them. That he has _preferences_. He spent most of his first fifteen seasons in a single room.

People are the same way. He would like Julio less if they didn’t argue. He enjoys that their relationship brings out the entire range of emotions, otherwise he never would have known that he was capable of them. This particular argument, however - it carries significant weight in Julio’s mind. Certainly more than any dust-up they’ve had about battle tactics or musical preferences. And yet, Julio avoids settling the issue when given the chance. Four years ago, Shatterstar simply would have asked what the problem was. Back then, he knew that he alone was permitted past the castle walls.

Now, however, he keeps falling into pit-traps, like a defective crecheling, or a one-season wonder.

Longshot wanders up to the roof, whistling off-key. “What’s on your mind?” he wonders, voice sprightly as he shucks a knife from his sleeve and starts sharpening it against a flake of brick he picked out of the office walls.

“Humans don’t make any sense. The longer I spend here, the less I understand.”

Longshot clicks his tongue sympathetically. “Ah, yes. That’s why Alison and I had to get divorced, even though my _uemeur_ still sings for her.”

“Hn,” Shatterstar responds, turning the mug around in his palms. There’s something off about the hot chocolate. It’s a few shades sweeter than the brand Madrox usually buys. 

“But the strength of that song does not diminish, no matter the distance between us. In fact - “ Longshot leaps onto the lip of the roof weightlessly, rolling the knife along his knuckles. There are shards of light clinging to his hair like moisture. “- we just finished having some very athletic and emotionally fulfilling sex two hours ago. You don’t have to torture yourself like this.”

“I am _not_ being tortured,” Shatterstar snarls. He’s beginning to suspect the drink isn’t chocolate-based at all.

Longshot licks his thumb and runs it along the flat edge of the blade. The knife glows silver in the moonlight, resonating with his biorhythm. “If you say so.”

“My _uemeur_ does not “sing” at “great distance”. Being away from Rictor does material damage to it. I do not wish to be apart again.”

“Hm. I wonder if it’s because you’re -” Longshot stops himself short, and they stare at each other. Longshot is almost translucent in the pale wash of moonlight, hair spilled out around him like a watercolour halo. Things are so simple for him. He doesn’t know why he knows the things he does, and he’s long past feeling tragic about it. Shatterstar stares down at his hands, with their five fingers and the weighty memories of twenty four seasons he never thought he’d live to see.

He pulls to his feet and shuts his eyes. Then he tosses the mug over his shoulder. When he turns around, Longshot has caught it by the handle, looking a little surprised that he’s holding anything at all. He takes a sip, and his whole face lights up.

“Ah!” he exclaims. “I love French Vanilla!”

At sunrise, Shatterstar strolls around the corner to the agency’s favourite coffee shop. He gets himself a real hot chocolate and fetches Julio a coffee the way he likes it (three cream, two sugar, but if Madrox asks: black). He heats up two pieces of leftover pizza in the microwave. There is no pineapple.

“Oh man, did I ever need this,” Julio yawns. He is rubbing his neck, which is so marked up he’s probably going to wear a turtleneck to save face for the rest of the week. He takes a deep whiff of the coffee before drinking it. “You’re the best, Star.”

Shatterstar has come to recognize this as what Julio says where most other couples would say _‘I love you’_. Neither of them have ever said _‘I love you’,_ which until this moment has never struck Shatterstar as odd. Their relationship is far more elemental than that, too vast and deep to cage within the constraints of a three word cliche. The way he feels about Julio is obvious, and better reinforced through action than speech. He has already explained himself anyway, and Julio’s memory is uniquely excellent for a human. He has professed to remember cruel things said to him by classmates when he was just a child of six or seven seasons, so it’s unlikely he would have forgotten anything as important as the words they exchanged in Mexico.

But perhaps that is an alien way of looking at it. Perhaps a human would feel differently. He slouches in Julio’s desk chair - a chair that he forced Julio to pick up off a sidewalk sale after Theresa explained that he’d been living out of a suitcase for a year - and watches him dress. He briefly considers reigniting their argument from the previous night, but Julio’s actually smiling this morning, fussing with his hair in the mirror with a fastidiousness that Shatterstar hasn’t seen since Murderworld and talking animatedly about taking a trip down to the city archives to do some deep diving on a case Madrox’s been spinning wheels on for weeks.

 _“I haven’t seen him smile in years,”_ Theresa said. _“Not until ye showed up. Whatever ye’re worried about, Star, at least he isn’t tryin’ tae kill himself anymore.”_

He decides to wait.

 

**(10).**

“C’mon, c’mon, gun it you useless p-piece of shit!” Rictor’s flooring the gas as hard as he can, but the hearse’s wheels keep spinning out on the sandstone flats. They managed to take out the Sentinel - by the skin of their teeth, as usual - and even secure its black box, but they almost got straight up bushwhacked by the delayed escort. It would be embarrassing after everything they’ve dealt with in their shitty fucking lives to get taken out by a couple guys with uzis in a rusty pickup, but that rusty pickup is gaining on them faster than they’re putting ground between them.

“Do not admonish the X-Factor hearse,” Shatterstar shouts calmly from the passenger window, deflecting bullets with his swords. “It’s all we have left of Madrox. Besides the farm, of course.”

“ _Dios Santos,_ Star, shut the _fuck_ up and teleport us outta here already!”

“I made an oath to Layla that we would return the car in one piece.”

“Oh, in _that_ case!”

There’s definitely something nostalgic about trying to dodge bullets and navigate the harsh desert landscape while Star hangs out the window nattering on about a totally trivial topic. Only back then, they didn’t have the get out of jail free card that was the ability to teleport _literally anywhere in freaking time and space!_

“What is the fucking hold u -”

 _SHINK!_ Goes one of Shatterstar’s swords. “There,” he says, ducking back into the cab. “I deflected a bullet into their front left tire, where the weight from the engine is heavily distributed. That will slow them down and give us a window to teleport.”

Rictor resists the urge to roll his eyes. He feels like the oldest twenty-five year old on the planet sometimes and here is Star, still taking time out of his day to be effortlessly cool the same way he was when they were seventeen and wanted by S.H.I.E.L.D. for being radical outlaws with terrible fashion sense.

Star cups his face with a warm hand. “Do you know where we’re going?” he asks softly.

“Yeah,” Ric lies. Half-lies. He’s not picturing _nothing,_ but he’s kinda got other shit on his mind. Luckily, Shatterstar is the only person in his life who has ever had legit _faith_ in him. It’s kind of a crapshoot whether that means Star’s gonna call him out on his shit, or just smile and follow after him guilelessly. He has a bad habit of doing either or at whatever time it’s most personally inconvenient to Rictor, but this time he takes Ric at his word.

He tips out the window again and crosses his swords. Seconds later, they’re blazing through the twin light constructs of Star’s portal and straight into a sand dune.

“Oof,” says Ric as they execute the comfiest car crash in history. Two more bullets whizz by their peripheral, then Star’s portal cleaves shut behind them plunging them into total darkness, and even more complete silence. “Where the hell are we?” he wonders after a moment. Out loud.

Star whirls around to scowl at him. Well, Ric can’t see him scowling, but he fuckin’ knows what Shatterstar looks like. “Rictor! You said -”

“Look, I wasn’t - we’re not dead, okay?” He kicks the door open and staggers out into the night. The moon is just a thumbnail, but they’re so far out from civilization the the stars are vibrant ribbons of silver spilling out in all directions. Rictor blinks once to adjust his eyes to the light, and then he knows where they are.

So does Star. “Camp Verde…” he’s saying appraisingly, exiting his side of the car through the busted out window.

“Y-yeah.” Ric’s voice sounds about as small as he feels, staring out at the endless hills of red sand and the distant shadows of ancient mesa. Small in a good way, though. He and Star grin at each other across the roof of the hearse. This is where they became friends. Where X-Force became a team. “Well, let’s make sure the merchandise is okay.”

The Sentinel black box is still intact. A bullet blast through Ric’s trusty Mission Impossible Rig, but the only thing it wrecked was two thirds of his fingerprint kit. The serum samples are all safe. They toss the mission shit in the trunk - that is, the place where the coffin’s supposed to go - and then sit side by side on the back bumper, catching their breath.

Rictor tosses his head to the side and gives Star a once over: his hair’s disheveled and frizzy at the tips from where he got jolted by the Sentinel. He’s got a smudge of black grease on his cheek and a two foot singe mark raked down the back of his white uniform. When he finished chopping the thing’s head off, he’d leapt backwards and landed on the sand with the grace of a dancer. But he was grinning like a crazed jackal - that old, wild smile of his that showed every single one of his teeth. Now, he was calm as a spring day, his smooth features glowing in the starlight.

It was self-evident to say something like: _“Oh yeah, Shatterstar is the hottest guy I’ve seen in my life”,_ but this was the shit that made him beautiful. Cute, even - the fact that he was made of such extreme contrasts, and none of it was contradictory, and Rictor had been the first one to see any of it.

Oh, to hell with it.

“Hey.” He says, switching to Spanish. “Isn’t it a shame that we never fucked at Camp Verde?”

“Our friendship was very new at that point, Julio. I don’t think either of us were personally ready for such a development.”

“Well, I’m just sayin’ - it’s an oversight we can fix pretty easily.”

Star turns his head slowly to blink at Rictor with those big confused doe eyes, as if he’s halfway convinced that he’s suggesting they indulge in a little impromptu time travel. Ric sighs longsufferingly and shoves him into the back of the hearse.

Yup, nice an’ comfy. Just like they left it.

*

“Every other guy on the planet sucks at sex compared to you, I swear to God.”

“That’s nice, Rictor” Shatterstar says, trying to wrestle Rictor back into his shirt. “Don’t fall asleep.”

Ric tries to bat Star’s hands away, but the guy’s limbs are so long and he’s so fucking _strong_. “C’mon, we’ve gotta have at least two hours before you can jump again. Relax.”

“Almost exactly two hours,” Star confirms, zipping up Rictor’s pants. “Which means we have plenty of time to talk.”

Ric pushes his hair out of his face and glowers at Star from under the shade of his palm. “Talk? We’ve been talkin’ all freaking day.”

“Have we?” Star leans back on his heels. He’s illuminated by a shimmering border of starlight, his expression lost in shadow. “You were the one who said that we should not allow sex to waylay important arguments. We should resume our earlier discussion.”

Rictor pushes up on his elbows. “... Star Wars versus Star Trek?”

“ _Julio,_ ” Shatterstar says, in that tone of voice only he can enact: the one that makes Ric feel like 150% the asshole he was, instead of the usual 100%.

“Do…” he bites his lip. “Do we really… _need_ to talk? Can’t we just let this be… I dunno, whatever it is?”

Shatterstar is quiet for a few moments. Then he says: “I have been many things to you, Julio, but I will not be a one night stand.”

Oh. There it is. The even better tone of voice that makes him feel like a 200% asshole. The reason he and Rahne were never going to work out - despite the obvious sexuality mismatch - is because she could only ever get him to 115%.

“... yeah. Yeah. Okay. Sorry, dude. Let’s talk.”

Star hands him a 5-hour energy drink.

He sits on the hood of the hearse with his knees drawn up to his chest, sipping it despondently. Shatterstar is pacing a goddamned quarry into the sand. He pivots to a stop in a move as decisive as any sword stroke when he finally gathers his thoughts.

“Explain to me why you want to be “broken up”,” he implores, spreading his arms.

Rictor raises his eyes to the sky and asks the God he doesn’t believe in but whose name he constantly takes in vain to give him strength. Now that the sex endorphins are wearing off, he’s getting grumpy again. It doesn’t help that the desert is freezing at night, and all he’s got on under his padded leather jacket is a cotton v-neck.

“Well, to start Star, it’d help if you had some basic fucking concept of what it _means_ to be broken up. Do you even get it? Like, what that would entail if we did it for real?”

Star frowns and sets a knuckle to his chin. He really does seem like he’s struggling with it. “We’d… eventually go back… to being best friends, yes?”

“Yeah, theoretically. But are you really okay with that?”

“Being your best friend is more than acceptable,” he replies, in almost the exact same tone he said it seven years ago. Star does that sometimes, like he’s literally replaying the memory.

Rictor snorts. “Sure, you’re saying that now, but what happens if I start dating some new guy?”

Shatterstar’s jaw twitches. Ric keeps pushing.

“C’mon, Star. You gonna be the best man at my wedding?”

Star pops one of his swords. He unhinges it from its arm holster, spins on his heel and calmly drives it into the sand dune as hard as he can. He turns back to Rictor and says: “I apologize. I have been trying my best to play along with you, because as I understand it an important part of romantic partnerships is exercising patience. But I do not want to make it seem as if I will not fight for this relationship as hard as I have fought for anything in my life.”

Rictor lets out a weak, humourless laugh. “That’s the thing, isn’t it? You just don’t know how to lose.”

“I see no reason to admit defeat yet. You are hardly committed to being “broken up” either.”

“I -”

Star doesn’t let him get a word in edgewise: “I have made no overtures or solicitations towards you over the past two days out of respect for your wishes. And yet, here we are anyway.”

Rictor’s hands are shaking. He squeezes the energy drink bottle so hard that it pops. “Fine. Okay. You want me to say it? I’m miserable without you, Star! But I’m miserable with you too, in a completely different way. And I’m really startin’ to think that one doesn’t actually have anything to do with the other so… so what the fuck do we even do about that?”

Shatterstar tilts his head. “... we can go to couple’s therapy?” he suggests, uncertainly.

“Oh, no - no, no, no -” Ric leaps off the hearse, shaking his head, hands in the air. “No, _fuck_ no. We _can’t_ go see a shrink. First of all!” He holds up a demonstrative finger. “I hate shrinks. _Second of all:_ I already know what they’ll say. That we’re a co-dependent mess, and probably shouldn’t see each other anymore even as friends, and I -” he stutters, pulls into himself. “I couldn’t stand that. I really couldn’t.”

Shatterstar raises his chin. _Imperiously_. “Feh! They would have to best me in mortal combat before they could keep me from you.”

Ric looks up through his bangs. “See, that’s the sort of shit you say that makes people think our relationship is kinda messed up.”

“You know I don’t care what other people think,” Star says, simply and truthfully. Rictor sighs miserably.

“Okay. It’s - i-it’s me Star. _I_ think our relationship is kind of messed up.”

Star tips his head again. “Why?”

Rictor leans back against the hearse and rubs both eyes. This conversation was hard enough the first time they had it five years ago. “Look. Have you ever _tried_ to be with someone else?”

Star frowns. “I have slept with seventy-eight people of multiple genders since returning from Madripoor. I don’t understand why you’re asking me this, since I was under the impression it has been a point of contention between us for some time.”

“Wait, seventy-eight!?” Rictor yelps, bouncing off the car in shock. “In _less than three years?_ ”

“Not all of the encounters were singular, of course.”

“Are you fucking kidding m -” _Breathe in. Breathe out. Focus. Shut up, Jamie, I am so not doing Cognitive Behavioural Therapy_. “No, that’s not what’s important. I don’t mean sex, Star, I mean,” he rolls his wrist, “- have you ever tried to _be_ with someone else, th-the... the way you are with me?”

Shatterstar huffs. “What a ridiculous question. I would not _“be”_ with someone else the way I am with you, Julio, because they are not you.”

Okay, now he’s just playing dumb. Ric can tell, because he’s not making scarily intense eye-contact. He strides forward and lightly whaps him in his stupid buff chest.

“God _damnit,_ Star! I _know_ you know what I mean! Stop avoidin’ the question by pretending you’re still fresh off the ol’ interdimensional transporter!”

Star’s gaze flickers left and he regards Ric with a grimace that might as well be carved from stone. “Very well,” he says, very slowly. “It seems to me that you believe my attachment to you is largely based on the fact that you were instrumental to my emotional and sexual awakening, and that I have not re-examined this loyalty, which you worry is reflexive, immature and coincidental.”

Rictor’s mouth is suddenly very wet. He feels like he’s going to hurl, hearing it said out loud like that. “Y-yeah, _amigo,_ that about sums it up.”

It happens like flipping a coin; Star’s stoic expression splits open to reveal a flashpoint of potent rage that Ric hasn’t seen from him in years. His lip curls back and his branded eye flashes white.

“Do you think me a fool!?” he demands with a hiss. 

Rictor stumbles back in the sand and nearly loses his footing. “Wh-what? No!”

Shatterstar slices a hand through the air. “Do you think I’m a _child!?_ ” His Mojoworld accent is faint these days, but sometimes it slithers out on soft ‘th’s and hard ‘k’s.

“Of course not, Star. I - I’ve never -”

“Do _not_ condescend to me, Julio -” he takes a step forward, closing the distance and lording his superior height in the space between them. “I can tolerate it from anyone but you.”

Rictor holds eye contact as long as he can stand it. He swallows hard, and mutters: “You say that, but in that case you’ve _tolerated_ a lot of crap from me. I’ve condescended to you plenty of times.”

He sees Star nodding from the corner of his vision. “You have. But I have forgiven you these things. Do you think I do this because I’m some… some whipped denizen of the doghouse?”

Things were getting a little _“Star’s first few months on Earth”_ there, in a way that was starting to wig Ric out even though he was telling the truth when he said that he had never been afraid of him, not even when the guy spent the majority of his time sulking around the base because mean old Sam Guthrie wouldn’t let him eviscerate everyone who looked at him funny. But that breaks the spell. Rictor starts laughing. Snorts right into the back of his hand. Shatterstar deflates, looking very much like a dog who’s been left out in the rain.

“You are condescending to me right now.”

Rictor shakes his head. “No, no, dude. I’m not, I promise. I just - _whipped denizen of the doghouse_. That’s a good one, man. I didn’t realize how much I missed those little Shatterstar-isms.”

“Shatterstar-isms?” he repeats, voice climbing in pitch.

“Yeah, that’s what we used to call them, those weird word-salad metaphors you used to spout. I think Tabs coined the phrase.”

“You were all mocking me.”

“No - we thought it was…” he trails off and meets Star’s eyes.

“Cute?” Star asks with a pout.

“Yeah. We thought it was _cute_.” 

Shatterstar’s shoulders drop. He reaches up, instinctively, to fiddle with his hair, and seems shocked to discover how short it is. Lamely, he says: “You were not the first member of X-Force to make overtures of friendship towards me. You were simply the most insistent.”

“Uh huh.”

“Furthermore, I would not have been receptive to these overtures if I had not been… curious about you. I am very good at blocking out unwanted stimuli, even stimuli as annoying as you were.” 

“Gee, you always know just what to say, Star.” 

“No. I don’t. But that is what you like about me.”

Rictor crosses his arms. “ _Is_ it?”

“Yes,” Shatterstar continues confidently. “You are comforted by the fact that I always say what I mean, because you are someone who ceaselessly second guesses everything people say to you. For the same reason, I appreciate that you are brusque and temperamental. While I am very good at dismissing things that I do not wish to be concerned with, your inability to ‘leave things alone’ prevents me from hiding behind my gladiatorial training instincts. Although I do believe there is a chance that we may have experimented sexually regardless of other circumstances due to the close-quarters nature of X-Force’s outlaw lifestyle and the various heterosexual dalliances that were always preoccupying our teammates implicitly socially isolating us, our complimentary personalities allowed us to develop a friendship beforehand, and it is that friendship that still binds us together today.”

 _What the actual_ … Rictor turns around because he can’t both watch and listen to this phenomenally dry academic breakdown of his only real romantic relationship. Did non-mutant superheroes have to deal with this shit? Is this how Sue Storm explained her affair with Namor to Dad-bod Richards?

Upon further reflection: probably yes.

“You’re not makin’ us sound any less co-dependent here.”

“What I am describing is a beneficial interdependence, Julio. We - as Domino once described it - are very good at “taking the piss” out of each other.”

“Dom said that, huh?”

Star waits a beat before adding: “Once, I asked Layla to run away with me.” 

Rictor whirls around. “What the _fuck?_ ” 

Star’s hands are tucked tight under his arms. He won’t make eye contact. “She told me that I was afraid you would throw me away once you had your powers back. This was true. I was terrified.” 

“I…” Ric licks his lips. “Wh-why would you think that?” he asks, even though he fuckin’ knows full well _why_.

Star shuts his eyes. “It is impossible to know how another person feels.” 

“Unless you’re a telepath,” Ric scoffs. But they all fuck up their relationships too. He and Star have never thrown down half as well as he used to watch Cyclops and Jean Grey go at it back at the original X-Factor HQ.

“Which neither of us are. I know how I feel about you. It is possible for me to put it into words. Into actions. For a long time, I couldn’t...” he gestures, frustrated. Finally, he opens his eyes and says: “I have doubts as well. About the strength of your feelings for me. I’m not as blind to these things as you think I am.”

“... huh.” Ric says, because that’s all there is to be said. 

“It feels… as if you only want me when you require some deep hole to be filled.” 

Rictor can’t help it, he snickers. It’s not an amused noise, just like, the common courtesy you gotta give to someone when they don’t realize they just made a sex joke. Star looks offended for a moment, then smiles. 

“Oh, I see. While the innuendo was unintentional, I do mean sexually as well as emotionally.”

Yep, yep - that was a whole lot of shit Star just dumped in his lap, but Ric isn’t done having his mind blown over the Layla revelation, as if the brat couldn’t stick any more bread-knives in his back. _I made an oath to Layla that we would return the car in one piece,_ Star was saying all poe-faced earlier. They were alone on that farm together. For days. For _weeks,_ maybe, Ric doesn’t fucking know! Because he and Star were _broken up! Poor aggrieved widow Layla Miller, so lonely, probably wilting around the farm in a sheer, white nightie like she’s on the cover of a Harlequin Romance novel -_

 _While we were broken up,_ he reminds himself. _While you were giving Bobby Drake the world’s worst aborted blowjob right after telling him to hit the road._

It’s different. Because. Because -

The ground is trembling under his feet. He’s so fucking jealous that he could pass out. Or crack the desert in half. Y’know, either or.

He tries to keep it cool. “Could you have been, uh, fulfilled? With Layla? The way you… say you are with me?”

“No,” Star says automatically, a bit mortified. Then he thinks about it, and it’s Rictor’s turn to be mortified: “Maybe,” he amends. “I don’t know. Perhaps. After some time. The me who arrived on earth would not recognize the me I am now. I could change with her.” 

“Oh.” 

Shatterstar holds out his hands, palms up. “This is what you wanted, correct? I have done it. I _have_ put thought into being with someone else.”

“Yeah. But now that I’ve heard it I feel like crap. ‘Cause, y’know, I’m a fuckin’ hypocrite.”

“Don’t be threatened by Layla,” Star is smiling faintly. “Survival always requires backup strategies. I don’t want to be with her, however. I choose you. Over and over again, I’ve chosen you Julio. You were the first choice I ever made in my life. I would like very much for you to be the last.”

Those words go through Rictor like a bullet. All this time he’s been working overtime to convince himself that Star only ever comes crawling back to him, like a dog or something, out of some sense of dutiful familiarity. Of course that wasn’t true: it was impossible to force Shatterstar to do anything he didn’t want to do. Ric knows that better than anyone. _What the fuck’s wrong with me?_ He asks himself. It’s freaking pathological, the way he’s always hating himself over where and how he doesn’t belong while running away from the few people who actually want him around. From the specific person who wants him around the most.

“I’m sorry,” he says, because he can’t think of anything else. “I’m a dick for making you say all that out loud.”

“No,” Star says, voice firm. “It is good that I said it out loud. I have long assumed that things between us were unspoken because they were mutually understood. This has lead to many unnecessary problems. In that sense, I have been "a dick" too.”

“Relationships require communication, huh?”

“Yes. Just like detective work.”

Rictor shoves his hands in his pockets and tips back to look at the sky. Shatterstar used to be real freaked out by the how big the sky was here. _“It goes on forever?”_ he asked everyone about six thousand times in a tone of voice that made it seem more like he wanted to fight the sky than understand it. _“Define ‘forever’.”_ Ric’s been to Mojoworld now. He’s seen the dizzying fractured lights of the arena skybox, the landscape smothered in noxious, yellow fog, and the way arena fighters are forced to measure their lives in thirty-second flashes of violence and noise with nothing in between except mind-numbing loneliness. He didn’t need to see it to understand, though; he’d been through something similar with The Right. He woke up every day wondering how and why the fuck he was still alive. Forever was a pretty hard concept to grasp.

“How _do_ you feel about me?” Shatterstar asks.

Rictor laughs and pulls his hands out of his pockets so he can wave them around a bit. “ _Dios,_ Star, I. When I’m with anyone else, all I think about is you.” 

Star hums, ambiguously. 

“Do you know what that means?” Ric demands, striding forward so he can jab him in the chest. “That means every fuckin’ time I’ve had sex in my _entire_ life, I’ve been thinking about you, you smug asshole.”

“Of course, I have endeavoured to have impeccable skills in all aspects of my life.”

“That’s not the only reason,” Rictor mumbles, tangling his hands in the lapels of Star’s open jacket. Star looks at him thoughtfully. That was what he wanted to hear.

He leans his head on his shoulder. “I guess I should say it.”

He feels Shatterstar chuckle more than he hears it, the noise is so quiet. “What? That I’m ‘the best’?”

God. Rictor presses his eyes shut. “You’re just on the ball 100% of the time, huh? You ever miss a single detail in your entire life?”

“Yes. Often the very important ones.”

“Yeah,” Ric agrees. Then he takes a deep breath and says: “I love you.” Shatterstar doesn’t respond. He doesn’t go tense or weird or anything though, so he keeps going, because he’s telling this to _himself_ as well. “I mean, obviously I love you. But there was always something holding me back from goin’ all the way there, y’know. Like I was waiting for the other shoe to drop with you. Maybe one day Mojoworld would need you again, or you’d finally figure out that there were seven billion other people in the world and most of them are less difficult than me. I don’t think you realize what it was like for me dealing with you when we were kids. I mean - here I was, an insecure teenager, thinking I was gonna be closeted forever and you were just always hangin’ around shirtless asking me to teach you about human emotions - it was too good to be true.”

“If I were really “too good to be true”, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.”

“Yeah. Because it turned out you were a real boy after all.” He pulls back, still holding onto Star’s coat, so they can look at each other.

“Julio,” he says, “I -”

But Rictor covers his mouth. “ I know. You don’t have to say it.”

Shatterstar frowns, childishly. “But I _want_ to say it. I will say it every day if necessary.”

“Then start doin’ that tomorrow,” Ric slides his hand around to cup Star’s neck. He’s afraid he’s gonna get all weird and weepy if he hears it at this exact moment. “Right now, just -” He drags him into a kiss, one that gets heated real fast. Star slips his hands under his thighs and lifts him right up, deposits him back on the hood of the hearse. They make out for a bit, then lay side by side watching the sky get darker, then bluer. The star-scape ebbs and flows like currents in the ocean. Like the way the earth yawns awake with the temperature shifts at dawn.

“That is the tenth shooting star we have seen in as many minutes,” Shatterstar observes as a point of light smears into oblivion above them.

“Yeah, it’s just shit bouncing off the atmosphere. It’s happenin’ basically all the time.”

“Hmph. Then it’s a rather self serving superstition humans have that if you wish on one of them, your request will come true.”

“Most people don’t really notice how common it is. Like, in this day and age no one really spends a whole lotta time stargazing, right, so when they catch one it’s really special.”

“Then perhaps they should look up more often.”

It’s such a simple statement, weighing so much. Star’s answers to things are always about that easy. _Tactically sound_ is how he would put it. Rictor is suddenly overcome by an intense wave of fondness, powerful enough that it makes him want to say something so cheesy he’d probably have to commit ritual suicide afterwards, like: _“Well I never needed to wish on a shooting star, ‘cause I had you.”_ It’s not _untrue:_ Shatterstar _is_ extremely good at getting things you need done, done. Especially if it involves stabbing something.

Instead, he says: “Okay, this is fucked up, but I was so jealous.”

“I am aware you were jealous. We have had this argument many times.”

“No, not about you having sex with other people. I mean, it was about that too, but mostly just…” he makes a vague hand gesture. “This. All of this. You smiling and laughing, the way you make jokes and have opinions and shit... for a long time no one else believed me that you actually had a personality, now everyone gets to see it. And it’s fucked up and selfish for me to think this way, because it means you’re happier now, that you’re _healthier_ now. But I’m not, and that sick part of me wishes that all those things still belonged to me.”

Shatterstar is grinning. He rolls over and pins Rictor against the hood of the car between his forearms. Rictor’s heart goes to his throat and he remembers how when they were kids, Star’s hair would fall around him in curtain, so thick that it blocked out the rest of the world. Just them, alone together.

“Julio,” Star says softly. “It does still belong to you. That is what I have been telling you this entire time.”

Rictor has to take a second to catch his breath. “I miss your hair,” he responds stupidly.

Star furrows his brow and touches his temple, where the hair is shortest. “I missed you touching my hair.” 

“ _Please_ don’t tell me that’s why you cut it.”

“Of course not. I cut it because an enemy grabbed my ponytail during a battle and chopping it off was the only recourse to avoid a severed neck.” He pauses, and smooths back Rictor’s hair, which is longer than his right now. “It is, however, part of why I kept it short.”

“Why didn’t you grow it back when we were together again?”

“There are certain benefits, I’ve found, to being able to blend in.”

“After Mojoworld, I wanted to ask you to keep it long. But I thought that was like, y’know, a fucked up thing to do considering the circumstances.”

Shatterstar blinks down at him. “Are you asking me to grow my hair long again?”

Rictor looks away. “I’m not technically your boyfriend right now. So, uh, that would also be a kind of fucked up thing to do right? C-considering the circumstances…”

Star cups Rictor’s face in his hands and presses their lips together. “Julio,” he whispers. “Ask me. Ask me to grow my hair long for you.”

That’s… it’s… _well_. It makes Ric feel like he’s going red all the way to the top like a cartoon thermometer about to burst. He’s always been careful to not do or say anything to tread on Shatterstar’s relationship with his own bodily autonomy because he knows for a long time that’s all he really had and, for a longer time before that, he didn’t even have _that_. Star saying this to him is like… it’s like a marriage proposal or something, but more-so.

Rictor’s voice is shuddering when he says it: “Star… I want you to grow your hair long again. Just like when we first met. Long enough that I can wrap it around my hands three or four times and _yank_ it.”

Star opens his mouth like he’s gonna say yes immediately, but then he sits up and says, with absolute certainty: “I will take it under consideration.”

Rictor laughs so hard he rolls off the car. “You asshole!” he gripes, wiping sand off his ass. Star is laughing too, in that very quiet, measured way he does. 

“Is that a good start?” he asks.

“Yeah,” Ric nods. “It is.”

*

They get the car back to Layla in one piece, just as was foretold, or whatever. Ric looks away when she pushes up on her tiptoes to kiss Star on the cheek, but he’s not that put out about it, not now that he’s looking at her in her overalls and mud-stained rubber boots, cradling her and Jamie’s kid against her chest. The dumb, stupid baby has Jamie’s dumb, stupid eyes and everything. She really does seem lonely, so they come inside for hot chocolate and fill her in on all the latest cape community gossip.

 _“Y’all look like a mess, what happened!?”_ Sam yelps when he sees them, but he’s more than impressed when they drop the black box on his desk. Right by the picture of his wife and kid. Ric contemplates for a few minutes how weird it is that a bunch of his friends have kids now, but the best thing that’s happened to him in the relationship department lately is getting shot at by a fuckin’ Sentinel.

Stuff like that is why he likes Shatterstar. _Ostentatiously raucous,_ indeed.

Outside, Rictor kicks the grass, hands in his pockets. “So do you, I dunno, wanna go for brunch?”

“I won’t require food for another twelve hours at least.”

Ric snorts. “Yeah. I know. I was askin’ if you wanted to go on a date. Y’know, make another go at this.”

Shatterstar smiles, just barely. It’s his second oldest smile, the one that only Rictor can discern. “Yes. I know. And I am asking you: where do you really want to go?” He holds out his hand.

Rictor’s heart skips a beat. How can it always feel so new and exciting between them every time? Shit, it’s true; he’ll never love anyone else. Why the fuck would he _want_ to? “Anywhere with you, amigo,” he says, taking Star’s hand.

“Close your eyes, Julio, and picture it.”

With a flash of light and a subatomic hum that cuts through the landscape, they’re gone.

 

**(2).**

Every day with Shatterstar after X-Force is an adventure. Whenever Rictor loses track of him for five minutes, he always stumbles across him doing something completely fucking unbelievable. This time, he rounds a corner to discover Star - wearing the big, pink sun-hat he bought in San Antonio after being introduced to the concept of what happens to redheads exposed to the desert sun - smoothly removing a sword from the body of an ATM.

“What the fuck are you doing?” he demands.

Shatterstar holds up their bank card. “The keycard wasn’t working.”

“It’s not a keycard, dummy. It’s not _unlocking_ anything, it’s telling the computer how much it’s supposed to give us based on what’s in the account.”

Star eases the ATM’s chassis open. “I fail to see the distinction. There is still money inside.”

“ _Madre de dios,_ ” Rictor groans, smacking his forehead. But Star’s not wrong: there _is_ money inside. 

So they grab the cash, and don’t get out of the truck until they’re three towns away. They end up in a place that’s technically still on the American side of the border, but that looks and feels like Mexico; all adobe brick buildings with wood shutters and bottle-thick windows. Everyone speaks Spanish and the soft drink machine in the corner store serves horchata.

“Shit like what happened with the ATM can’t happen again.” Ric gumbles as they stroll down the town’s main drag. “You gotta start learning this stuff for yourself, Star. I’m not always gonna be around to do it for you.”

Shatterstar’s eyes go wide. “Why would you not be around? Are you ill? Have you been concealing an injury from me? Let me see it.”

He reaches for the hem of Rictor’s shirt, business-like and unconcerned that they’re in public. Ric slaps his hands away, scandalized; a passing man shoots them a leery look and walks faster. “No - _madre mia,_ you’re so fucking literal. I meant... Christ, Star, do you really think you’re just going to follow me around forever?”

Shatterstar furrows his brow and looks askance for a moment as he considers this. “Yes,” he says. Simple, confident, making direct eye contact so intense Rictor has to look away.

“Seriously?”

“I do not consider it “following you around”, as we often discuss the logistics of our next destination together. But yes, Julio, I want to stay with you forever, so there is no problem if I do not learn the subtleties of Electronic Banking and arbitrary sartorial gender signifiers.”

Rictor grounds the palm of his hand into the space between his eyes. His brain always short-circuits when Star says shit like this to him. “It’s too early in the morning for this conversation,” he mutters, turning away. “Let’s just get breakfast and figure out where we’re gonna crash for the night.”

Star’s eyes go as bright as, well, _stars_. He vaults over a bike rack to catch up. “May we have the _huevos divorciados_ again?”

“Uh yeah, sure. That’s a pretty basic dish, dude.”

Star strokes his chin, deep in thought. “I like eggs. I would never have thought to consume the unfertilized embryo of another living creature. This seems like an oddly brutal method of nourishment for a culture in which comfort is prized over strength, but it is a surprisingly versatile nutrient.”

Ric tucks a snicker into the fold of his bandanna and casts a look at Star as they stroll down the street. He’s smiling _naturally,_ which is new, his face made blue by the shadow of his stupid sunhat. With his hair pulled back in a loose braid and a smattering of freckles starting to show on his shoulders, he looks almost human. It wasn’t something anyone would have noticed when he was scowling and hissing all the time, but Star actually has soft features: a blunt nose, long lashes, cheeks that dimple when he grins. Ric thinks that if he took a picture of him right now, no one back in X-Force would recognize him except for the tattoo. Then he feels something sick and hard in the pit of his stomach that says he doesn’t _want_ them to see Star like this. It’s possessive, a little bit, but also he gets this feeling like if anyone else saw Shatterstar - undefeated champion of the Murder Games - all sunburnt and smiling and pontificating on the philosophical implications of eating scrambled eggs, they’d know just how deliriously, terrifyingly into him Rictor was. Like Star’s happiness is a reflection of his own.

Which it was, kinda.

 _Forever_. Jesus fucking Christ, they really were in trouble.

 

\----  
\----


End file.
